nudity – Page 14 – The Magnificent 60s

John and Mary (1969) ****

Woefully underrated. Remove the weight of expectation and you’re left with a bittersweet romance. This just wasn’t what critics anticipated from stars Dustin Hoffman, coming off the back of Midnight Cowboy (1969), and Mia Farrow, previous film the coruscating Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and certainly it seemed there was resentment at the audacity of British director Peter Yates attempting to switch from his action roots, best shown in Bullitt (1968). Worse, that Yates was trying to introduce a New Wave vibe.

In the end-up it’s sweet, but getting there is a prickly affair and it’s precisely this unique approach that creates its appeal. Where the standard set-up comprises meet-cute, break-up, back together, for the most part this looks as if actual romance, as opposed to sex, will never get off the ground, the pair smothered by doubt expressed in internal monologue.

Whereas, in The Fixer (1969), for example, hearing a character speak of their feelings outside of dialogue almost torpedoes the picture, here it works a treat, because it’s dealt with as if it was dialogue of the unspoken variety. Past experience that forces both characters to make suppositions about the other’s intent creates a very amusing and essentially true barrier to progress.

Back in the day, at the dawn of the singles generation, the idea of two young people hooking up for one-night stands filled the moral majority with shock, not just that widespread use of the Pill in avoiding pregnancy invoked promiscuity, but that random encounters immediately ended up in the bedroom rather than the becoming the start of a wooing (and discovery) process. These days, of course, Tinder and other such social media inventions, create umpteen opportunities for attraction to translate into instant sex.

But it doesn’t reduce the type of anxieties that are so well addressed here.

You can start with the basic morning-after notion of “how do I get rid of her?” all the way through to assuming such easy attitudes to sex on either side would destroy an ongoing relationship, and along the way dipping into such minefields as how to get to know another person, does he/she even like me or would they fall into bed with the first person to ask them, are they even as attractive in the cold light of day than when perceptions are muddied by alcohol and excitement, and, of course, the ultimate, was performance up to scratch.

The Carlton was one of the smaller London West End cinemas and often used for prestigious openings to create the hold-overs that would build audience awareness and, such as here with box office increasing week-on-week, encourage cinema bookings.

This takes the unusual route of being peppered with flashback while the pair engage in spikier dialogue than you would find in the standard Hepburn-Tracy Hudson-Day romcom. And often what they say is the opposite of what they feel. Setting off in several directions at once – back a year or so, taking in the activity of the previous night and ploughing through the current day – could be off-putting but I found it worked a treat.

Anal retentive domesticated furniture designer John (Dustin Hoffman) hooks up in a singles bar with untidy politically-motivated sometime-actress Mary (Mia Farrow). His first reaction on waking up is to explore the apartment (rather large for New York), wonder when his wife will return, and think of all the deceptions he could pull. His first reaction borders on pure fear: she’s already planning to move in.

That neither has a genuine idea of the other person’s feeling provides the movie’s dynamic and the entire movie consists of them adjusting their expectations against a very contemporary backdrop of protests, politics, cinema verite and sex. Though primarily non-sexist and quite gender-equal, she isn’t looking to become a kept woman, for example, it does touch upon the notion that an easily-available woman is not far short of a whore, whereas, naturally, a promiscuous male is entitled to a free pass.

Her last relationship was with a married man (Michael Tolan), but she dropped him once he started talking about divorcing his wife. For John, girlfriend Ruth (Sunny Griffin) dramatically upped the stakes, arriving at his apartment with luggage, items of furniture and a rampant dog, enforcing on John responsibilities he did not want. Unusually, for the era, he is not politically involved and can cook, both of which attributes/skills we discover are the result of a mother so committed to politics that she neglected her children, never stocked her fridge and left her children to fend for themselves.

Each could press the nuclear button at any time. They’re attractive singles so more sex is just round the corner, going their separate ways the easier option, building a relationship far more difficult.

Dustin Hoffman shakes off a lot of the tics that were already showing and would inhibit later performances in a character far removed in sexual confidence from The Graduate (1967), but in some ways still touchingly naïve, and delivers a very believable performance. That it doesn’t fall into the usual Tracy-Hepburn battle of the sexes with witty put-downs owes much to the highly-nuanced performance of Mia Farrow who isn’t, as you might expect, in the least fragile and expresses her independence and challenges his views in a non-aggressive fashion.

Completely ignored by the Oscars, technically it won plaudits from Bafta, bracketed with Midnight Cowboy for Dustin Hoffman picking up the Best Actor Award, and with Rosemary’s Baby and Secret Ceremony for Mia Farrow in being nominated for Best Actress – such arcane rules later changed.

In small parts look out for Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, 1974), Tyne Daly (Cagney and Lacey TV series 1981-1988), Don Siegel’s son Kristoffer Tabori (Journey through Rosebud, 1972) and Olympia Dukakis (Moonstruck, 1987). John Mortimer (Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1965) wrote the screenplay from the Mervyn Jones bestseller.

Cinematically and narratively refreshing, manages to be entertaining and thoughtful at the same time.

Puppet on a Chain (1970) ****

The spy genre was dying on its feet, even James Bond slipping into spoof territory, and it was left to Alistair MacLean to revive the genre with believable heroes and settings not just chosen for their scenic potential, fitting somewhere between the gritty policiers of Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) and with an emphasis on violence that Sam Peckinpah would be proud of.

Stylish bullet-ridden opening, crackerjack climax. In between depicting Amsterdam scenery and depravity side by side comes betrayal, duplicity, drugs, heinous deaths, plenty action, and as much as Bullitt (1968) reinvented the car chase this did the same for speedboats.

Tracking point of view follows an assassin into a house where he kills three people and removes something from the pendulums of clocks. U.S. narcotics agent Sherman (Sven Bertil-Taube) flies in to Amsterdam but before he can collect vital information from colleague Duclos he is murdered.

Top Dutch cops Col De Graaf (Alexander Knox) and Inspector Van Gelder (Patrick Allen) are helpless to stop the growing heroin traffic. Van Gelder, with addicted niece Trudi (Penny Casdagli), knows only too well the personal cost.The police force is riddled with leaks, the heroin gang out to stop Sherman from the get-go.

But Sherman has his own nasty medicine to deal out, and hands out beatings and death to those who get in his way. Helped by colleague Maggie (Barbara Parkins) and, inadvertently by Duclos’s girlfriend Astrid (Ania Lemay), the trail leads to the Morgenstern warehouse, which stocks all sizes of puppets, and a church run by shady pastor Meegeren (Vladek Sheybal) which has re-purposed Bibles.

Sherman has no sooner escaped one attempt on his life than he encounters another, so the action never lets up. Meanwhile, clues lead him to a boat in the harbor and he discovers how the heroin is being shipped. Maggie, on hand to offer romantic consolation, shares his tough assignment and questions his methods.

*Although revivals were usually sold on the weight of a star, but by this point MacLean was a box office commodity and, let’s face it, neither Hopkins nor Bertil-Taube had much of a calling card.*

The trail isn’t that hard to follow but the obstacles are considerable. Meegeren and pals take hanging to the extreme, strangling victim on steel chains, dangling them high as a warning to others. So, mostly, leavened, depending on your point of view, by titillating views of the Dutch capital and a sexy dance troupe that would put Bob Fosse to shame, its fist- and gun-fights all the way.

Except for his dalliance with Maggie, a romance that has to be kept under wraps, Sherman fits the tough Alistair MacLean template with a ruthless streak wide enough to have won plaudits from Where Eagles Dare team He gets a good dousing in the sea and is an unwilling candidate for a brainwashing technique that combines tradition with a personalized version of the sonic boom.

But the highlight without doubt is the high-speed speedboat chase through Amsterdam, beginning in the wider Zuider Zee before racing through the narrow twisty Dutch canals.

For the Dutch Tourist Board it was a game of two halves, organ music aplenty, cobbles and canals, and people dressed in traditional garb promoting the city as a desirable destination but the unsightly addicts and the sex trade as likely to put overseas visitors off (although for many that may well be the icing on the cake).

It was rare at this point, in a polished Hollywood-style picture, to dig so deeply into the seamy side of a city, but his one pulls no punches, nitty-gritty winning out over gloss, and where Easy Rider (1969) and others of that ilk opted to canonize drugs this favored grim consequence.

It seems particularly difficult to get the casting right for an Alistair MacLean movie of the lone wolf variety – the all-star war pictures by contrast having no trouble attracting major players – and if you turned up your nose at Richard Widmark in The Secret Ways (1961), George Maharis in The Satan Bug (1965) and Barry Newman in Fear Is the Key (1972) you might quibble at Swede Sven Bertil-Taube (The Buttercup Chain, 1970). But he makes a fairly decent stab at the standard dour character.

Barbara Parkins (Valley of the Dolls, 1967), way out of her comfort zone, does well as the tough woman with a soft center. But, all told, you would say it benefits from largely casting unknowns as it prevents the audience arriving with preconceptions. In her only movie Penny Cadagli is the pick of the support, especially as her role in the movie is to play a role.

Although Geoffrey Reeve (Caravan to Vaccares, 1974) hogs the directing credit, the speedboat chase, other action scenes and the tightening up of the picture was the work of Don Sharp (Bang! Bang! You’re Dead, 1966). And Alistair MacLean didn’t, as he might have expected, receive sole screenwriting credit either, sharing it with Sharp and Paul Wheeler (Caravan to Vaccares, 1974).

Not only plenty of bang for your buck, but a riveting chase and one of the first sightings of heroin supply as the key driver of the narrative.

The War Lord (1965) ***

Contemporary audiences will gib at a narrative that relies on legalised rape. Audiences at the time had the same response but since then it has picked up considerable critical acclaim on account of its down-and-dirty portrayal of a medieval era far removed from the knight in shining armour. But it still pivots on the distasteful notion of “droit de seigneur”, the right of any noble to take the virginity of any female underling on their wedding night – it was motivation for William Wallace’s rebellion in Braveheart (1995).

The idea that this was pervasive or even occurred at all has been proven to be historically inaccurate. Logic tells you that any ruler wanting to keep his subjects in check would scarcely resort to wholesale rape that could spark disloyalty among his subjects. Or that any no one would be unaware of the dangers of inbreeding should the nobleman’s seed result in pregnancy.

What of course the movie does get right is that women were treated as chattels – “she’s mine” / “you’re mine” a recurrent refrain – or were makeweights in deals uniting the vested interests of kings or dukes.

As reward for years of service to the Duke of Ghent, Chrysagon (Charlton Heston) is handed a fiefdom in Normandy, prone to attack by Frisian raiders from the neighbouring Netherlands. In interrupting such an assault, Chrysagon captures the enemy chief’s son without being aware of it, prompting a later battle.

While the area boasts vestiges of normality, a priest and a strong tower, the inhabitants are inclined to the pagan rather than Christianity with rites (reminiscent of Game of Thrones) involving stone and trees while anyone using herbs for medicinal purposes is likely to be accused of witchcraft. Chrysagon takes a fancy to Bronwen (Rosemary Forsyth) already bethrothed to Marc (James Farentino). Egged on by his brother Draco (Guy Stockwell), Chrysagon decides to take up the option of droit de seigneur, but refuses to return the bride after the allotted time period (before dawn), incurring the wrath of the villagers who recruit the Frisians to their cause.

So it’s siege time although it seems unlikely that the attackers would be capable of producing such dangerous siege weapons in such a short time or that they wouldn’t simply resort to starving out the beseiged. Chrysagon’s troops engage the attackers in time-honoured fashion from the top of the tower by arrow, boulders and boiling oil. Chysagon slides down a rope like Errol Flynn to prevent the raised drawbridge being lowered and uses a boat anchor to dislodge the siege tower. Battering rams and catapults soon enter the equation.

The only question-mark (unspoken) against Chrysagon’s employment of the “droit” privilege comes when the Duke demotes him and appoints Draco in his stead, prompting various endgame twists.

The battle is interesting enough, threat repeatedly countered, but there’s only so many times a director can cut to a soldier tumbling to his death. The ending is an anomaly, Chrysagon showing more respect to the son of his enemy than the wife of his villagers, and it seems odd that Draco is suddenly revealed as a bad guy, despite not being the one who triggered the conflict.

Chrysagon might have easily have fallen into the Martin Scorsese category of characters with “no redeeming features” – who are exempt apparently from the need for decency because of war – and it’s hard to summon up the necessary audience sympathy to make this picture work, especially given its starting point. Had Chrysagon merely fallen in love with Bronwen who reciprocated his feelings and that caused enmity among the villagers it would have been one thing but to start out from an historically inaccurate base is another.

One of the problems is that Bronwen doesn’t evolve. Her transition is from interesting to passive. She has actually gone through a marriage ritual (of the Druid kind, but still binding as far as the villagers are concerned) and is therefore embarking on an adulterous relationship once the cock crows. It seems ludicrous, without allowing the woman dialog to express her feelings and acknowledge the peril of her actions, that she would believably take this route.

So, if you like, accepting the droit de seigneur, in some ways it becomes a bolder picture, a major Hollywood star risking his reputation by playing a rapist, and in the way of all rapists justifying his action. And, like the characters in the recently-reviewed Play Dirty (1969) or Judith (1966), it becomes a question of individuals as pawns, the powerful taking advantage of position to abuse the weak. And it wouldn’t be the first time the innocent have suffered through a superior taking an indefensible approach.

Franklin Schaffner (Planet of the Apes, 1968) directed. Charlton Heston (Diamond Head) performs as if he’s the French equivalent of a Brit constantly biting on that stiff upper lip. Richard Boone (Rio Conchos, 1964) is wasted. Guy Stockwell (Tobruk, 1967) essays another weasel. It’s a picture of two halves for Rosemary Forsyth (Where It’s At, 1969) – while being wooed she’s good but then she’s pretty much dumped as far as the narrative goes.

Screenwriter John Collier, who later wrote the even creepier Some Call It Loving (1973) – an early Zalman King production – and Millard Kaufman (Raintree County, 1957) adapted the screenplay from an unusual source, a Broadway play by Leslie Stevens (Incubus, 1966) called The Lovers. The play had a different perspective, the bride ultimately committing suicide, while the War Lord and husband killed each other in a duel. Needless to say, there are no Frisians, so no siege, and no brother.

Before the arrival of Ridley Scott, this would been viewed as the best depiction of genuine medieval siege, so that part certainly still holds up. But the rest of it will only stand the test of time if you are willing to view it as an expression of the corruption of power.

The Gypsy Moths (1969) *****

Unsung masterpiece. In the same year, director Jphn Frankenheimer went from the career nadir of The Extraordinary Seaman to an absolute gem. Beautifully paced, exquisitely observed, with five heart-wrenching performances of naked repression. For star Burt Lancaster a companion piece to The Swimmer (1968), for leading lady Deborah Kerr better work than even The Arrangement (1969), for supporting actor Gene Hackman (Downhill Racer, 1969) a wake-up call to Hollywood. Sparked by thrilling aerial sequences. And like Easy Rider (1969) interprets transience as freedom.

And in the most stunning piece of directorial bravura since Alfred Hitchcock despatched Janet Leigh halfway through Psycho (1960), here John Frankenheimer, four-fifths of the way through, leaves the others to pick up the pieces after the star’s apparent suicide.

A trio of sky divers – Mike (Burt Lancaster), Joe (Gene Hackman) and Malcolm (Scott Wilson) – on a barnstorming tour of small town USA board with Malcolm’s estranged Aunt Elizabeth (Deborah Kerr) and Uncle John (William Windom) in the small Kansas town where he was born and orphaned at age ten. John clearly resents the intrusion, Elizabeth finds it impossible to even hug her nephew, but a single glance between Mike and Elizabeth says it all. She is the bored housewife, he the conqueror.

But for all the subsequent revelations that would be melodramatic meat-and-drink to the likes of Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement, the entire tone is low-key. While fuelled on regret, this is not a movie that feasts on it.

And quite astonishingly, there is a whole pile of information dumps that serve to add tension to the tale. The stars of the show are all involved in the nitty-gritty, penning dates and times on posters, sewing their kit, the bombastic Joe acting as marketing guru and cheerleader. In a talk to women’s group, while purportedly explaining how a parachute works, Mike gives his audience a whiff of danger. For the whole enterprise depends on coming close to death. The longer a sky diver takes to open his parachute, hurtling to the ground at 200 mph, the more the crowd soaks it up.

The sky divers are long past the days of thrill-seeking, this is just a job, they are itinerants with nobody meaningful in their lives. Sky diving is “not only a way to live but also a way to die as few things are.”

Except when the performer, Mike is so reserved he might almost have disappeared into a void except silence seems to fill out his personality. He embarks on an affair with Elizabeth with scarcely a word spoken.

The screenplay has an amazing structure, each character exposed in novel fashion. The extremely realistic Mike finds himself in the deep waters of imagination. The overly-confident Joe speaks of his fears to the topless dancer (Sheree North) he has picked up but only when she’s safely asleep. He beats his chest in Church as he recites the “I am not worthy” section of the old Catholic Mass. Even the dancer gets a couple of great lines, confiding in a friend that Mike would have been her first choice to bed but Joe proved a decent substitute.

And there’s just a wonderful, initially mystifying, set of scenes, that could easily have been cut, but left in display the director’s utter mastery. A cranky conductor is rehearsing a marching band for, we learn later, the Fourth of July parade, picking, as is the way of cranky conductors, on some innocent in the band. Come The Fourth of July the marching band turns into main street – and finds it empty. The entire town, in a demonstration of ghoul-ness, has decamped to watch Malcolm attempt the stunt that cost Mike his life.

Returning home, Malcolm finds no homecoming despite his childless aunt desperate for a surrogate son. If she was any more buttoned-up she would explode. “I just wasn’t very observant,” she observes, explaining how her sister stole away her lover. And when that couple died in a car accident, John, who married Elizabeth on the rebound, forbade his wife to adopt Malcolm because he didn’t want to be daily faced with the son of her true love.

So many scenes are wordless observation. We focus on the dead eyes of John, pretending to be asleep, when his adulterous wife returns. Elizabeth watches her husband in a mirror. Virtually every shot of Elizabeth reveals the torment of a woman desperately clinging on to sanity. Every shot of Malcom reveals rejection.

Characters are viewed in long-shot, through doors, or from the sky, and then in bold extreme close-up, but not in a kind of experimental fusion of style, but through careful directorial consideration. You feel that every shot is just the correct shot for the moment.

For once, Frankenheimer has no conspiracy theory to peddle, but oddly enough this bears similarity to the car crash of The Extraordinary Seaman in that it is riddled with ghosts, of choices not taken, of regrets taken root.

And there is something quite remarkable in the character construction. Both Mike and Malcolm are melancholic, sapped of energy. Into this gap bursts Joe, a vibrant personality, the one gets every party going and always ends up with a bottle in one hand and a girl in the other. It’s quite a stunning performance from an, at this point in his career, a scene-stealer of some style.

In previous films Gene Hackman was always doing something, the hallmark chuckle still in embryo, but his performance often got in the way. Here, the screenplay by William Hanley – based on the novel by James Drought – effectively places him center stage, taking up the slack from the other pair and Hackman responds by proving how he could carry a picture if he was in fact the star.

Scott Wilson (In Cold Blood, 1967) takes the opposite approach, drawing us in with his soulful eyes and a demeanor calling out for affection. He dominates the final section as he, too, contemplates suicide, a pretty tall order given at this point he is in the sky and his eyes are masked by goggles.

When Deborah Kerr asks Burt Lancaster, “Why are we so contemptible to you?” it’s the question she’s asking of herself and that self-loathing guides her repressed performance, occasional bouts of adultery her only release, but unable, as with her early lover, to charge headfirst into happiness.

Lancaster’s role is central but not over-dominant in the way of The Swimmer. While seemingly the picture’s anchor, Frankenheimer is duping the audience in the manner of Hitchcock. Lancaster is not the unshakeable monolith he appears, but a fragile heart.

Critics, possibly still confounded by The Extraordinary Seaman and feeling Frankenheimer had shot his bolt, were pretty dismissive of this at the time. It doesn’t score highly on any of the current critical aggregate charts.

But I find that simply astonishing. If ever there was a movie demanding reappraisal, it’s this.

Just stunning.

Go see.

Psycho (1960) *****

Even though critically reviled at the time – “up to his clavicle in whimsicality” (Variety) / “fairground sideshow” (Films and Filming) – Hitchcock blasted wide open the doors to what would be deemed acceptable in modern American cinema. Made on a low budget in black-and-white following the sumptuous color of North by Northwest, it seemed a perverse choice. No studio wanted it. Hitchcock had to fund it himself, Paramount merely the distributor.

On paper, and based on a real-life case, it was certainly an unappealing prospect, leading actress murdered halfway through by a maniac with a predilection for dressing up as his mother. Using the crew from his television series, Hitchcock made it quickly for just over $800,000, a quarter of the cost of North by Northwest. An initial stab at the script from James Cavanaugh was discarded and working with Joseph Stefano (Black Orchid, 1959) the director shifted the focus of the Robert Bloch novel.

Instead of a fat, middle-aged, alcoholic, Norman Bates would become young and attractive like the character from French thriller Les Diaboliques (1959). The story itself changed from “Norman and the role Marion plays in his life…(to) the redemptive but ultimately tragic role Norman plays in her life.” Although Hitchcock openly claimed he detested filming, having already worked out the entire shoot in his head, this was never entirely true. Some ideas just did not work. In Psycho, for example, the director had planned a helicopter shot tracking into Marion and Sam’s hotel room but “high winds kept jiggling the camera” and it was changed to three separate shots.

Also, by using two cameras, he allowed the opportunity to choose a different shot than originally imagined and, in a change from the shooting script, the post-shower focus changed from Sam to Lila, making her the focus of the film’s final section where she confronts the killer.

Nor is Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) a typical Hitchcock villain. She is not cut out for the work. Alone in his repertoire, she regrets her action, tortured by, not so much her conscience, as the thought of getting caught. Having stolen $40,000 she is so jittery she turns a harmless highway cop suspicious.

Once more, Hitchcock has us rooting for the bad guy or, in this case, the bad girl. In Vertigo (1958), the drive is silent, but here the silence is punctuated by imagining what people are saying about her, knowing pursuit is inevitable. By the time she reaches the Bates Motel, she is repentant, planning to return and face the music, “I stepped in a private trap back there and I’d like to go back and pull myself out of it.”

Unfortunately, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) has other plans. In Rear Window (1954) the peeping tom is a good guy, here he’s anything but. Although Bates is presented as fighting his demons, he always gives in, while Crane never hears a voice urging her on, telling her she will get away with it. Crane has a working conscience, Bates a defunct one.

Bernard Herrmann’s strings-only score behind the jarring opening credits is only the first in a series of taboos broken. In the opening scene beefcake Loomis (John Gavin) is shirtless, nothing unusual there for a male star, but to show an actress three times in her underwear and more flesh glimpsed in the shower is novel.

Killing her off is, obviously, not the done thing either, that scene a colossal shock at the time. Effectively, she is the bait, the sexiest MacGuffin ever, leading us to the mystery of Bates.

There are many brilliant scenes: Crane’s car sinking in the swamp, the murder of private detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam), the shrieking music as the strings hit their topmost register, the discovery by Crane’s sister Lila (Vera Miles) of the corpse of Bates’ mother, the motel’s neon sign flickering in the dark, the spectral house behind the motel filled with strange voices and, of course, the enigmatic Bates, alternating eager smile with defensive reaction. There are a host of great lines: “The first customer of the day is always trouble,” says the salesman; “We’re quickest to doubt people who have a reputation of being honest,” says Arbogast; and the immortal, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”

On release, the director engineered a publicity coup by insisting nobody be allowed into the cinema after the start. This was an illogical demand for what did it matter if a patron missed the opening 10 or 20 minutes? But it certainly got the public’s attention – for a different reason entirely. It was an assault on their basic rights as theatergoers.

In those days people went into a film 30 minutes, 50 minutes after the start and left when the film came full circle. When it opened, long queues outside the box office, the best kind of word-of-mouth, attracted interest, thus alerting people who might otherwise have simply passed by. Even drive-ins were forced to comply. Trade advertisements showed Hitchcock pointing to his watch, exhorting, “Surely you do not have your meat course after your dessert at dinner?” Exhibitors were promised a special manual, “The Care and Handling of Psycho.” As well as smashing box office records, it demolished another convention by showing in local New York theaters while still playing at major first run theaters in Manhattan.

The film has enormous visceral power. The shower scene has, rightly, achieved legendary status, every frame dissected by scholars, some images, the curtain wrenched loose, the hand reaching out, the dead eye, the blood draining away, imprinted on the universal brain, and the music unforgettable. The acting from Anthony Perkins (Pretty Poison, 1968) and Janet Leigh (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) is excellent, Leigh nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, Perkins not so lucky, ending up typecast. For collectors of trivia, Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, plays Crane’s office colleague. And for academics, especially those with auteur on their minds, this was a good place to start.

The Big Bounce (1969) ***

Femme fatale Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young) makes a fair bid for the coveted Bunny Boiler of the Year Award. Had she chanced upon the right wrong guy who could channel her inherent viciousness she could have turned into Bonnie Parker. The only thing that holds her back from being a feminist icon, taking revenge for male betrayal, is her lack of independence.

Mistress to rich farmer Ray (James Daly), she teases the hell out of his head honcho Bob (Robert Webber), makes love in a graveyard, and fuels her amorality by going from breaking windows, attempted burglary and big-time heist to driving cars off the road and murder.

Dupe is Vietnam vet Jack (Ryan O’Neal) who works as a hotel handyman and happily two-times her with single mother Joanne (Lee Grant).

Although easy with her charms, it’s sex that comes back to bite her when Ray explains that all this heady living comes at a price, pimping her out to a Senator he wants to impress. Whether that turns her against all men, including the dupe who she suspects of making out with Joanne, or whether she is plotting simple revenge against Ray isn’t made clear, but like the best femme fatales she has her eye on the loot that could bring her freedom and doesn’t much care what it costs to get it.

Nobody much cared for this picture, either, but I can’t see why. Sure, too much time is spent on Jack – he gets slung out of a job picking pickles for getting into a fight, and he lands on his feet with a friendly hotel owner Sam (Van Heflin) who buys him beers and even makes his breakfast, and pretty much could have the pick of any girl who walks into a bar. But that’s the usual narrative for film noir, pointing out, usually over and over, what an easy mark he is for a determined woman.

*Unusual for the foreign title to be better than the original but this certainly captures the character better.*

Nancy could have been less obvious, but she uses her perceived availability as a potent weapon – the scene where she holds her naked body just enough away from the panting Bob while probing him about his wife and children, is a classic – and she doesn’t make it easy for Jack either, although his reward is a drawn-out striptease. She’s the typical bored young woman looking for kicks, and like Pretty Poison (1968) you have to suspect that there’s considerable calculation behind what appear like spur-of-the-moment decisions, trying to work out just how far the dupe will go to retain her favors.

So while she races through the gears, Jack seems stuck on the starting grid, as his apparent good luck turns into confusion. And although he’s got the looks to attract women, he hasn’t the brains to understand them. He’s so dumb you just want Nancy to get away with it. If there’s a weak spot in the movie it’s that he just isn’t interesting enough to spend any screen time with. He boasts of having committed misdemeanours and he’s got a temper when roused but actually he’s your typical lost Sixties character looking for more stability in his life.

Unusually for a movie that’s drawn so much criticism, the supporting characters are quite appealing. Sam is also a very worldly Justice of the Peace. Ray, far from being an easy conquest, is a hardass, the scene where he deadpans a line that it would take him, oh, a week to replace her if she fails to sleep with the Senator is priceless. There’s also some decent stuff about war, how Jack never even saw the enemy he was killing. And Joanne is a great study, another woman endlessly drawn to the wrong men, who can keep her dangling while never committing.

And beyond the scene where Nancy poses as a naked statue in a graveyard that is obviously unforgettable, there’s a marvellous scene where Jack wakes up in a strange house to the sound of tapping. When, finally, he opens his eyes, he sees a small girl tapping her cup at the breakfast table; Joanne has a daughter she omitted to mention.

This was the first of Elmore Leonard’s crime novels to be adapted for the movies. But he wasn’t a Hollywood unknown. He supplied the source material for 3.10 to Yuma (1957) and Hombre (1967). And at this point he was keen on setting his stories in poorer areas, as well as pickle farming here, the Kentucky backwoods are the setting for The Moonshine War (1970) and melon farming for Mr Majestyk (1974). There’s not a million miles between Mr Majestyk reaching for his gun when threatened and Nancy for one when betrayed, but somehow he’s in the right and she’s in the wrong.

And while you’re at it you might as well reflect on the complexities of Hollywood. Leigh Taylor-Young (I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, 1968) carries this picture and despite what the posters show was top-billed. But she didn’t get one more starring role. Two flops in a row – this and The Games (1970) – and Ryan O’Neal gets Love Story (1971) and he’s king of the hill.

Definitely worth a look.

The Hawaiians / Master of the Islands (1970) ****

Contemporary audiences will find much to admire. Perhaps unintentionally, certainly unusual for the era in which it was made, this is driven by a strong feminist streak and the problems of fusing different new cultures – Chinese and Japanese – on an island already dominated by white immigrants. In some respects a companion piece to Diamond Head (1962), which also starred Charlton Heston, but in reality a sequel to epic roadshow Hawaii (1966).

Nyuk Tsin (Tina Chen) has been kidnapped from her village in China with the intention of selling her into a brothel in Honolulu. But when her gender is discovered on board the ship, captained by Whip Hoxworth (Charlton Heston), transporting Chinese laborers to Hawaii, a fight breaks out, her owner is killed and she is taken over by Mun Ki (Mako). He fully intends, on making land, to sell her and keep the money but at the docks Whip’s wife Purity (Geraldine Chaplin) intervenes and the couple are offered jobs as husband-and-wife.

*“Hawaii” (1966) was not such a big box office hit abroad as it was in the United States*
*hence the decision not to rely on the U.S. title “The Hawaiians” for the sequel.*
*In fact, unlike the U.S. poster the novel is not so upfront.*

Mun Ki’s entrepreneurial spirit is obvious from the minute she reaches Whip’s plantation, as she starts planting seeds in a tiny area in front of the hovel that is their dwelling. That turns into a vegetable garden and eventually she has a side business feeding laborers. Her gardening skills encourage Whip to entrust to her to grow the seed pineapple plants he has stolen from French Guiana, a continent away in South America.

When that proves successful, and Whip manages to find an artesian well through the lava bed, he embarks on a career as a pineapple farmer, and as a reward, deeds her land.

Meanwhile, Nyuk Tsin discovers she is wife only in terms of procreation. Mun Ki already has a wife back home, so Nyuk Sin can only officially become an aunt to the five children she bears him, each named after a continent (Asia, Africa etc) and who do, it must be said, come in handy for her farming business. She is wealthy enough that attempts are made, as much from envy and fury at her success as anything else, to steal her property.

While officially disbarred from the position of wife, her feelings for her husband are so strong that when he contracts leprosy she accompanies him to the island of Molokai and looks after him until rescued by Whip. Now with a prosperous farm, and remaining unmarried, she is rich enough, and clever enough, to send one son to America to train as a lawyer. Through her own endeavors and willpower she becomes not the slavish wife, dependent on her husband and his whims, but a strong independent wealthy woman, and leader of her expanding clan.

Theoretically, this is a subplot in the film, but in reality director Tom Gries (Number One, 1969) affords it as much time as the supposedly main narrative which, in contrast to Diamond Head, sees Whip as the black sheep of the family, disinherited and left only with land that is useless until the cultivation of pineapples makes it viable. His wife, while ostensibly weak, is also of a feminist disposition, abandoning her husband after the birth of her only son Noel (John Philip Law) to return to her Hawaiian roots.

When the Japanese arrive on the island Whip takes as a mistress the educated self-sufficient Fumiko (Miko Mayama). The circle of interbreeding and cultural infusion is complete when Noel marries Mei Lei (Virginia Lee), Nyuk Tsin’s only daughter.

It’s a lot more melodramatic than that, to be sure, Whip at odds with his family, Purity sending him bananas by denying him sex after Noel’s birth, and then withdrawing from his life. Various characters flit in and out, like the alcoholic well-digger Overpeck (Don Knight), and the tale embraces, like Diamond Head, the period when the United States annexed Hawaii.

Allotting so much screen time to Nyuk Tsin can’t have been accidental, maybe it was just visionary, but taking her as the focal point pivots more on her single-minded nature than the haphazard character of Whip, who achieves success through luck, theft and brutality. It’s remarkable that Nyuk Tsin has understood its importance of land ownership, the bedrock of any country’s institutional hierarchy, and strives so hard to achieve that footing and becomes in essence the family breadwinner. If the foreign title had been changed to Mistress of the Islands it would not have gone far wrong.

Fans of the second-billed John Philip Law (Hurry Sundown, 1967) will perhaps be disappointed that he appears so late in the proceedings, essentially to ensure the narrative can embrace the generations, but also to show how attitudes can change for the good from one generation to another.

I’m aware I’m asking you to watch the movie from a different perspective from that advertised but it’s far more rewarding.

Charlton Heston is good, especially when transitioning from commander of all he surveys while on board ship to a mere family footnote on dry land. He can rant with the best of them, for sure, but underneath the fury you can detect the pain, cast aside by family and wife. The scenes where he fails to reignite sexual relations with Purity reveal how great an actor he is. We more often associate Heston with the lower half of his face, the jutting jaw, the flashing teeth, the dominance of his words, rather than the upper half where his eyes are so revealing of inner torment. There’s a sea-change in the standard Heston performance that runs through Planet of the Apes, Number One and here of a powerful man drained by circumstance.

But Tina Chen (Three Days of the Condor, 1975) is the standout, moving from humiliation to pride, often called upon to mutely absorb pain, but fiercely protecting husband and brood, and clever enough to calmly negotiate her way past husband and Whip to potential success.

Tom Gries, in his third picture with Heston, manages to create an epic feel to a picture whose limited running time sabotages that aim. His sweeping tracking shots provide the bravura but that is underpinned in the more intimate moments by sensitivity to character emotion shown in a look rather than expressed in dialog.

Screenwriter James R. Webb (How the West Was Won, 1962) had the job of chiselling another cinematic chunk from James Michener’s door-stopper of a novel and turning this sub-plot into a gem.

Well worth a look.

Rider on the Rain (1970) ****

This is not the Charles Bronson you think you know, the mean, truculent, monosyllabic persona who turned into a box office powerhouse later in the decade. It took the French to recognize the leading man qualities Hollywood determinedly ignored. God forbid, he is actually pretty charming, although his methods for squeezing information out of a suspect are, well, suspect. And he turns up pretty late in the picture, just when you think the focus is going to be on the suspect, Mellie (Marlene Jobert) and it’s going to be one of those pictures where an innocent woman is suspected of a crime and the man has to clear her name.

Except Mellie isn’t innocent. She’s killed a rapist who broke into her house and then dumped his body over the cliff. And she isn’t, officially at least, a suspect, local cop Inspector Toussaint (Jean Gaven) more interested in getting a loan from her husband, pilot Tony (Gabriele Tinti), to pay off gambling debts. Needless to say, any time the cop does knock on her door, she jumps out of her skin.

And she would have got away with the murder, except for the arrival of Dobbs (Charles Bronson). He turns up at a wedding, ensures she gets to see a newspaper headline of the murder, insinuates his way into her life, not too difficult once her husband heads off on another flight. She runs a bowling alley with her mother Juliette (Annie Cordy) who scarcely has a maternal bone in her body.

Rather than helping the cops solve the case, Dobbs is more interested in the red bag the rapist was carrying. But when she hands over the bag, it doesn’t contain the $60,000 Dobbs wants. We never see what Dobbs gets up to when he’s not with Mellie. But we hear it. His investigations may be carried out off screen but he’s tailing her – knows she bought a ton of newspapers – and tells her what he’s found out by speaking to cops and neighbors. Even though she’s replaced the cartridges in the shotgun she used to kill the rapist, he knows the gun has been fired. When she claims she was aiming at rats in the cellar, he points to the marks on the wall, too high for even the most acrobatic rat.

Mellie is trapped in a claustrophobic world, assailed by her own guilt and a jealous husband with too much unexplained loose cash (drug smuggling is the implication), turns against her best friend, boutique owner Nicole (Jill) who had an affair with her husband, and against her mother whom as a child she caught in bed with another man, causing her father to dump the mother.

*They started to get tricky with double bills in the 1970s, trying to suggest*
*the films were equally attractive, ignoring the fact that if they had been*
*such hits they wouldn’t have been paired in the first place.*

Most of the tension is self-inflicted but Dobbs has thing about nuts and soon is whizzing shells across rooms, some trick where they break on impact with a window, but the noise is like a shot, too close to the blast of the shotgun.

Every twist ratchets up the tension. And by concentrating on the suspect the police are ignoring and making Dobbs, by default, the chief investigator, and nobody to turn to, Mellie is turned inside out by his mere presence, never mind, when exasperated, he employs his own interrogation method, akin to waterboarding, except the liquid is alcohol, forced down her throat until her lungs are full to bursting.

The last act is a bit murky, as the locale shifts to Paris, involving a brothel owner and a set of gangsters who are even more intent on humiliating Mellie. With echoes of Charade (1963) and Moment to Moment (1966), it’s superbly directed by Rene Clement (Is Paris Burning? 1965), who doles out clues and twists like he’s playing a hand at cards.

In spite of the concentration on tension, he takes the time to build up his characters. A series of emotional flashbacks show the fault-lines in Mellie’s character, no matter that she initially appears confident with fashionable short hairstyle and white outfits bound to attract attention. Dobbs’ obsession with suddenly chucking nut shells around maintains the tension and his cavalier tone, especially his jocular use of a nickname, suggests an interesting personality behind the tough guy pose.

Like his script for The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), screenwriter Sebastian Japrisot is as concerned with ordinary life as with the thriller elements.

Charles Bronson (Farewell, Friend / Adieu L’Ami, 1968) delivers the best performance of his entire career, tough guy with a charming underbelly, kind of Cary Grant with muscle. Marlene Jobert (Catch Me a Spy, 1971) is excellent as the victim turned suspect, and even Jill Ireland, for whom a part was always found in husband Charlie’s movies, shows a different side to her screen persona.

A riveting watch.

Tiara Tahiti (1962) ****

There’s an odd tone to this comedy about that British obsession: class. The narrative arc is basically about come-uppance. But you would expect in any movie dealing with the upper-class that it is the poor man who comes out on top. But that’s not the case here and it’s not the case because, basically, the movie makers have decided that the confident charming guy buoyed up by a wealthy background should hold sway over the insecure chap undermined by his lack of breeding.

I doubt if they expected audiences to feel sorry for the jumped-up martinet Lt.Col Southey (John Mills) whose cushy number in post-war Germany is disrupted by the arrival of suave Capt Ainslie (James Mason). The former is reminded by the latter that he was once a lowly clerk in the stockbroking firm of which the captain, by dint of birth, held a managerial position. Soon Ainslie wins over the officers and humiliates Southey at every turn. To gain revenge, Southey informs on the junior officer who is arrested with illicit goods at the customs.

Several years later, Ainslie lives the life of Riley in Tahiti, beautiful girl Belle Annie (Rosenda Monteros) in tow catering to his every whim and under the false impression that he will soon take her back with him to London. He makes a living playing poker, and when luck runs against him can rely on the easily corrupted local police officer to keep his creditors at bay. Into this ostensible paradise arrives Southey, now chairman of an international hotel company, so important he can swan around the world answering to no one.

I had expected that having made it to the top of his profession by dint of hard work rather than accident of birth or having made the right connections, that Southey would have rid himself of his inferiority complex and that, somehow, he would get revenge on Ainslie for the humiliation in Germany. But that proves not to be the case and, in fact, any mention that Southey was once Ainslie’s mere clerk brings the high-flying businessman down to earth and he reverts to his previous jumped-up bumptious persona.

Only momentarily does Southey gain the upper hand, when the broke Ainslie seeks employment, but that lasts only until Southey reveals the part he played in Ainslie being cashiered from the Army. All along there’s been a sub-plot of a jealous Chinese storekeeper Chong (Herbert Lom, would you believe) trying to ease Ainslie out of the way so that Belle Annie will return to him. Chong arranges for a thug to bump off Ainslie. But when Ainslie survives the assault he blames Southey so that he can have the pleasure of ruining Southey’s career when he is kicked off the island.

*A significant change to the way films were distirbuted in Britain. Normally, it was London which got first bite of the cherry. Opening a film outside London was a bold move*

I can’t have been the only viewer to sympathise with Southey, the man who got to high-ranking positions in the Army and business through his own hard graft while charmers like Ainslie used their class to ease their passage. I had imagined that it would be Southey who got his revenge, employing Ainslie in a lowly position rather than the other way round. And it may just be me but I didn’t believe the suggestion in the final scene that any enmity Ainslie felt towards Southey was all in Southey’s head.

Be that as it may, the acting carries this one. John Mills adds a comic element to his stiff-upper-lip officer last seen in the more dramatic Tunes of Glory (1960) while James Mason (Age of Consent, 1969) is the essential cad who can get away with anything thanks to bucketloads of charm.

Several scenes stand out. You wonder if the famed Robert De Niro “you talkin’ to me” in Taxi Driver (1976) had its origins in the scene where Mills talks to himself in a mirror to build up his confidence before confronting Mason. The scenes where Mason dupes the police officer into believing the cop’s novel is a work of genius are very funny. Mason also takes the mickey out of a middle-aged Englishwomen by pretending to be a native Hawaiian.

And that’s not forgetting the exuberance of Rosenda Monteros – mistakenly given the “and introducing” credit when she had previously appeared as the love interest in The Magnificent Seven (1960) – not quite as dumb as she sometimes appears, able to con Chong out of new dresses and ready at a moment’s notice to run away with an athletic young sailor. Not to mention, too, that her bare derriere makes an appearance in a bathing scene rather risqué for the period.

Debut of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (Life at the Top, 1965, also dealing primarily with class) who has the sense to leave the actors to it. Written by Ivan Foxwell (A Touch of Larceny, 1960), it sticks too closely to the source novel by Geoffrey Cotterell, lumbering the movie with one sub-plot and a couple of characters too many, but excellent when concentrating on the warring protagonists.

Setting the class elements apart, this is all good fun, and the jousting between two of the greatest British actors of all time makes it more than well worth a viewing. It was a big hit in Britain at the time, not quite in the category of Dr No – oddly termed “a bizarre comedy drama” by trade magazine Kine Weekly and – second to Cliff Richard musical The Young Ones in the annual box office chart – but easily in the Top 25.

Setting aside my reservations about the tone and the perspective, I found this far more enjoyable than I expected as result of witnessing two class acts at the top of their game.

Hurry Sundown (1967) *****

Otto Preminger’s drama was the first of a trio of heavyweight films in 1967 – the others being In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – that took African American issues seriously. In post-war Georgia land-grabbing by ambitious Henry Warren (Michael Caine) pits him against World War Two vet Rod (John Philip Law) and African American farmer Reeve (Robert Hooks) who team up. Throw in a quintet of feisty women – Henry’s wife Julie Ann (Jane Fonda), Rod’s wife Lou (Faye Dunaway), schoolteacher Vivian (Diahann Carroll) – Reeve’s love interest – Henry’s lover Sukie (Donnie Banton) and Rod’s mother (Beah Richards) – and emotional confrontation comes thick and fast.

Preminger had spent most of the decade making films about big subjects – Exodus (1960), the politics behind the formation of Israel; Advise and Consent (1962), just politics; The Cardinal (1963), politics within the Roman Catholic Church; and In Harm’s Way (1965), Army politics and bluster around Pearl Harbor

Preminger is both economic and elegant. From opening dialogue to climactic court scene, the picture races along, and continuous use of tracking shots ensures the movie never gets bogged down. While there is no lynching, racist abuse, whether direct or indirect (through patronizing attitude) is never far from the surface. Corrupt Judge Purcell (Burgess Meredith) is by far the most vicious, his unrestrained language making you wince. But even those with more measured approaches have to play the game, Reeve gives a lift to Rod but has to let him off before they reach town in case anyone spots this, Rod forbidden, for example, to buy dynamite.

But the racists do not get it all their own way. Julie Ann stands up to the judge and her position in the community is so strong that others boycott the judge’s daughter’s wedding leading to the judge receiving a tongue-lashing from his wife. Weak Sheriff Coombs (George Kennedy) coming to arrest Rod is bamboozled by his female relatives while Vivian charms her way past the judge.

The women are uniformly strong. Julia Ann goes from seductive wife to distraught mother, but in between capable of defrauding Rod’s mother, her childhood nanny, out of her inheritance. Lou resents her husband’s return after in his absence taking on a full-time job while running the farm and now resisting the idea of selling up to Henry. Rod’s mother, beholden to white men all her life, now turns against them. The judge’s daughter (Donnie Banton) makes no bones about the fact that she is marrying her “dull” fiancé for his money. This is no spoiler because you will have guessed some similar outcome but at the end it is Vivian who takes the initiative in her relationship with Rod and marches into his house with her baggage, declaring she has come to stay.

And although the ruthless Henry is the bad guy, he, too, is afforded insight, soothing himself by playing a musical instrument, a man with talent who had “distracted” himself by pursuit of money. And there is another touching moment when he takes in a runaway child. Acting-wise, Michael Caine (Gambit, 1966) is a revelation. Gone is the trademark drawl and the laid- back physical characteristics. Here he talks snappily – and no quibbles with his Southern accent either – and strides quickly. That we can believe he is brutal, gentle, remorseful and ruthless is testament to his performance.

Similarly, this is a massive step forward in Jane Fonda’s (Cat Ballou, 1965) career, away from Hollywood comedies and sexed-up French dramas, and her internal conflict springs from being forced to choose between husband and son, between her innate sexiness that oozes out in every intimate scene and maternal longing to comfort her disturbed child. Her usual shrill delivery is tempered somewhat by the deeper emotions she is forced to bear. While her attempt to defraud Rod’s mother comes from a desire to keep her husband, her eyes tell you she knows that is no excuse.

What’s perhaps most surprising of all is the tenderness. There are wonderful, gentle love scenes between Caine and Fonda and Law and Dunaway.

Children, too, also unusually, play a central role. Henry’s callousness is no better demonstrated than in his earlier treatment of his son. Reeve’s eldest son also resents his father’s return and, viewing Henry as a more suitable adult, betrays his father. The Judge is obliged to drop one of the worst aspects of his racism in order to appease his daughter.

The acting throughout is uniformly good. Dunaway’s debut won her a six-picture contract with Preminger. Singer Diahann Carroll’s role as a confident young woman led to a television series. Robert Hooks would also enjoy small-screen fame. The surprisingly effective John Philip Law would partner Fonda in sci-fi Barbarella (1968) and link up with Preminger again in the ill-fated Skidoo (1969). Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962) and Thomas C. Ryan (The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, 1968) wrote the screenplay based on the bestseller by K.B. Gilden.

Unfairly overlooked by Oscar votes, who preferred the other Poitier films, Hurry Sundown, despite the rawness of the language and the innate brutality meted out to African-Americans, has been vastly under-rated. It is worth another look because at its core is not just racism but big business which scarcely cares about the color of those it exploits. It is as much about the power shift in relationships and ambition.