As his popularity in the 1960s faded, Marlon Brando was often called upon to save, or greenlight, a picture unworthy of his talent. Except that director Hubert Cornfield failed to extract enough tension from a kidnap thriller with an inbuilt deadline and a double-crossing sub-plot this might have been one to rise out of the mediocrity.
It’s not unknown for strangers working together on a robbery to adopt pseudonyms, colors in the case of Reservoir Dogs (1992) or cities as in Spanish television hit The Money Heist. Here they are known by their designated tasks, which seemed a nod towards artistic pretension at the time. Even so, the gang have too many frailties for taking on a caper like this, the pressure of a deadline and the publicity their crime attracts exacerbating the situation. So kidnapping a millionaire’s daughter (Pamela Franklin) are: Chauffeur (Marlon Brando), in on the job because he owes a favour to Friendly (Jess Hahn), whose sister Blonde (Rita Moreno) is also the chauffeur’s drug-addict girlfriend, the psychopathic Leer (Richard Boone) and a pilot (Al Lettieri).
All except the pilot are holed up in a remote beach house in France. The first signs of cracks show when Blonde is so drugged up she fails to collect her colleagues from a small local airport and, when suspecting the chauffeur of having sex with the girl, she explodes in a tantrum. And because she can’t get her story straight she attracts the attention of a local cop (Gerard Buhr). Despite making a good job of calming down the terrified girl, Leer has other plans for her which the Chauffeur is constantly trying to thwart. At various points various people try to quit. At various points romantic and family ties are pulled tight.
The details of the cash hand-over are well done as is the unexpected double-cross and the diversion allowing them to escape but about ten minutes of the running time is people driving around in cars, only at the later stages to any useful dramatic purpose, time that would been better spent filling us in on the characters. Most of the tension derives from a gang with two loose cannons and certainly the wait for the confrontation between Chauffeur and Leer is worthwhile.
The biggest plus point is Marlon Brando (The Chase, 1966) and even – perhaps because of – sporting a blonde wig and black tee-shirt remains a compelling screen presence. He might have been slumming it but he is certainly believable as the minor criminal way out of his depth. It’s a mistake to think of him as intended to exude menace along the line of Quint in The Nightcomers (1971) because this is actually a complicated role. On the one hand he clearly never wanted to be involved, participation triggered by a sense of honor, trying to keep his girlfriend and the kidnappee safe while at the same time happy to resort to considerable violence to achieve his ends.
The malevolent Boone (The Arrangement, 1969) almost steals the show, beginning as the voice of reason and gradually succumbing to his inner vices. The love interest benefits from Brando and Moreno (West Side Story, 1961), also in blonde wig, being ex-lovers in real life and it takes little to ignite the anger in Moreno. But her portrayal of the addict who cannot stay off her chosen poison long enough to carry out a simple task is excellent. Pamela Franklin (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1968) has little to do except look scared and she has one revealing scene when in attempting to seduce the Chauffeur sets up the prospect of a different kind of liaison with Leer.
Hubert Cornfield had not directed a picture since Pressure Point (1962) which acted as a decent calling-card and showed how good he was at creating tension between opposing individuals. Instead of focusing here on the characters, Cornfield seems more interested in the visuals, none of which as it turns out are particular arresting and in one instance virtually impossible to see what is going on.
Not so much a curiosity as a masterclass in how to blow a once-in-a-lifetime gig with Marlon Brando and what not to do with a thriller.
Blame the algorithm. Once I had to my great surprise found The Hunting Party (1971) on Amazon Prime the streamer decided that my next port of call should be another rape-filled western. There are only two things to recommend this – firstly, it makes The Hunting Party look like a masterpiece, and secondly it was filmed at the Spahn Ranch made famous by Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and as the place where the Charles Manson gang hung out before going on a murder spree.
One element of this picture will chime with the contemporary audience. Here, rape is used as a weapon, an unfortunate development in the last half century during a variety of vicious wars. As ever, woman is the innocent victim while man has convinced himself this is not only necessary but justified.
There’s maybe another echo if you want to be generous – of the sequence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) where Harmonica (Charles Bronson) is forced to witness the death of his older brother. Here Mexican stable hand Carlo (James Arena) witnesses the multiple rape and beating of his older sister who subsequently commits suicide. So he’s on a mission to track down the perpetrators.
Which leads him to the O’Hara ranch, where he is treated with racist and physical abuse. Ranch owner Jason (Joseph Mascolo) handles wife Susan (Virginia Gordon) badly, blaming her for not providing him with a son and heir. Their love-making is on the rough side and she seeks comfort among the cowhands, who prefer keeping their jobs to a roll in the hay with the boss’s wife.
Carlo kidnaps her. And at first you think she’s going to be used as bait to attract Jason, the last of the rapists of his sister, to a remote mountain shack. But, in fact, Carlo plans to eliminate pretty much the entire complement of ranch hands, hiding weapons at various ambush points on the trail and planting a bear trap in the ground.
But he’s got worse in mind. And apologetic though he is towards Susan, his plan is to make her suffer like his sister, which means tying her up, raping her and striping her back with a whip. The only good bit, if you can call it that, in this picture is that at the end Susan knifes to death her husband and escapes.
There’s one other bit that initially looks good and then tumbles into incomprehension. Jason has sent an advance scout up the mountain and told him to fire one shot if his wife is up there and two if she’s not. The cowboy doesn’t get the chance, Carlo killing him with two shots. So, registering this, Jason believes they’re on the wrong trail but then for no apparent reason continues up the same route.
From the amount of sexuality and nudity on show I guess, given the times when Hollywood was still only nibbling away at the edges of what was permissible, this was made for an entirely different audience than the standard fan of westerns. All women are present just to be used and abused.
Directed by one Lee Frost, whom imdb rates as “one of the most talented and versatile filmmakers in the annals of exploitation cinema.” Cowritten with producer Bob Cresse.
As it happens, those Amazon Prime algorithms did send me to a whole horde of westerns, some of which like Hombre (1967) and Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), I’ve already reviewed here. I’ll plunder this stack some more but take a more judicious view of what I watch.
Colossal flop and deservedly so. One of the most repellant pictures of a down’n’dirty decade.
It’s not just that rape takes center stage – two completed both supposedly by men in love with her and two attempts by more obvious scum – but that cattle baron’s wife Melissa (Candice Bergen) has to choose between murdering rapist husband Brandt (Gene Hackman) and murdering rapist outlaw Frank (Oliver Reed).
There was an unwelcome trend for consensualizing rape – Straw Dogs (1971) took the same approach – that a woman in a state of some terror would nevertheless warm to her molester. This is the worst kind of male fantasy fulfilment and that taking a women by force will nonetheless make her fall in love with you.
Just how keen Melissa is on her rapist is shown by her various attempts to knife him and escape. Which, of course, Frank dismisses in a version of that old trope, “you’re beautiful when you’re angry” in that he likes a spirited woman.
The otherwise cold-blooded Lee Marvin character in Prime Cut (1972) proved likeable because he had an honor code and didn’t take advantage of a vulnerable woman. It’s impossible to feel any sympathy for Frank especially as Melissa, a teacher, has been kidnapped not for ransom but for the sole purpose of teaching Frank to read. Presumably, being an outlaw who robs banks, he can already count. Maybe he needs help writing ransom notes.
Frank should have been taught to read in childhood, we discover in a twist at the end, because his father could read, which suggests he had a different upbringing to the rest of his gang, but, on account of being determined to annoy his old man, he refused to learn. So although he has a yearning to educate himself he’s not educated enough to work out that learning and kidnapping and rape don’t exactly go hand-in-hand.
The only way any attempt at romance is going to work, even theoretically, is if what awaits Melissa when rescued is worse. Husband Brandt is a venal individual. The movie opens with him raping his wife. Compared to his treatment of sex workers, she gets off lightly. And he balks at paying any supposed ransom on the grounds that his wife will most likely have been raped and return with an unwanted bastard son and he’s not going to pay $50,000 for that privilege. Ever since A Fistful of Dollars western heroes have been every amoral shade of grey but Brandt must be the darkest shade ever.
Plus he’s just taken delivery of rifles with telescopic sights that have a firing range of about half a mile so he’s up for a little sport, and with four other rich buddies sets out to hunt humans. The rifle is the equivalent to the Gatling Gun in The Wild Bunch (1969), a weapon of awesome power, and every time it hits home the camera focuses on the gory outcome. The 26 men in the outlaw bunch are soon whittled down.
This might have worked if the narrative had followed a different arc. Had Frank turned out to be Melissa’s protector rather than the most successful of her molesters. If the whole gang had show signs of seeking something maternal rather than just sexual in a woman or were all queuing up for a bit of education. And Frank’s treatment of her from the outset had been protective and she had shared with him her fear of her husband.
The best you can say about Frank is he’s a gentler kind of rapist. But he’s still a rapist and taking advantage when Melissa is at her most terrified, soaking wet from falling into a river while trying to escape. If he had continued just trying to soothe her and comfort her that might have taken the tale in a more acceptable direction, but, no, he decides a bit of rape is in order.
Frank’s too dumb to see that his men are going to turn against him if he doesn’t share out his captive and once he’s aware exactly who she is he should at least, in the eyes of the men, either demand a ransom or hand her back.
Although the long-range rifles tilt the odds heavily in favor of the pursuers, one of them is killed, and two, once they have decimated the outlaws, decide the hunt has gone far enough. Another, later on, takes the same view. But Brandt, determined on revenge, pursues the “lovebirds” into the desert where he kills both.
This was intended to launch British actor Oliver Reed (Hannibal Brooks, 1969) into the Hollywood mainstream but he’s miscast. Candice Bergen (Soldier Blue, 1970) can do little with a role that makes no coherent sense – unlike Michele Carey in The Animals (1971) she shows no sign of accepting an unwelcome protector just to survive. Had it not been for The French Connection (1971) and, taken in conjunction with Prime Cut (1972), Gene Hackman’s career might have spun off into playing a succession of villains.
One other notable turns up on the credits. This is produced by Lou Morheim who originally owned the remake rights to Seven Samurai (1954) and failed to finesse that into a significant credit on The Magnificent Seven (1960).
Discounting To Trap a Spy (1964), a movie combining two episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E series, this marked the debut of director Don Medford. Lou Morheim (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 1953), Gilbert Ralston (Willard, 1971) and Bill Norton (The Scalphunters, 1968). contributed to the screenplay.
The bizarre premise set a low bar. Every shade of ugh.
Unusually nuanced thriller. Unusually lean, too, barely passing the 90-minute mark. There’s a Hitchcockian appreciation of the danger lurking in wide open spaces. And the background is the Middle America of annual fairs, marching bands, pie-eating competitions, rural pride in farming and marksmanship.
But there’s an undercurrent that will strike a contemporary audience. The contempt of big business for its customers. The sex trafficking, too, will sound an all-too-common note especially as the young women come from an orphanage set in the heart of homespun America in what appears to be a streamlined service.
In the actual screen credits, Hackman was not above the title.
We shouldn’t at all take to hitman Nick (Lee Marvin) except that he’s got a code of honor and sparing with words. He’s been sent from Chicago to Kansas to sort out with what would later be termed “extreme prejudice” Mafia boss and meat-packer Mary Ann (Gene Hackman) who’s been skimming off the top. As back-up Nick is handed a trio of young gunslingers anxious to prove themselves while his faithful chauffeur owes Nick his life.
Mary Ann doesn’t just have a factory, he has a fort, a posse of shotgun-wielding henchman standing guard. So Nick has to plunge right in and confront the miscreant. As well as dealing with animal flesh, Mary Ann has a side hustle in sex trafficking, displaying naked women in the same straw-covered pens as his beef.
Responding to a whispered “help me” by Poppy (Sissy Spacek) Nick buys her freedom, but Mary Ann isn’t for knuckling down to the high-ups in Chicago and since he’s already despatched a handful of other hoods sent on a similar mission as Nick he’s intent on turning the tables.
The action, when it comes, is remarkably low-key and all the more effective for it. Swap a crop duster for a combine harvester and the head-high prairie corn for the usual city back streets and you realize someone has dreamed up a quite original twist on the standard thriller. No need for a car chase here to elevate tension, it’s already a quite efficient slow burn.
By the time this came out Hackman had won an Oscar for “The French Connection” (1971), Marvin already in that exalted league thanks to “Cat Ballou” (1965)
This could be an ode to machinery. The entire credit sequence is devoted to the way machines chew up cow flesh and turn it into strings of sausages and the like. The combine harvester chews up and spits out an entire automobile, grinding the metal through its maw. And then there’s the machinery of business, the ability, at whatever cost, to give the public what it wants, in whatever kind of flesh takes its fancy.
You’ll remember the combine harvester sequence and the shootout in the cornfields, but you will come away with much more than that. Remember I mentioned nuance. Sure Mary Ann is an arrogant gangster and you’d think with hardly an ounce of humanity, but that’s until you witness his relationship with his simple-minded brother Weenie (Gregory Walcott). That could as easily have fallen into the trap of cliché sentimentality. Instead, there’s roughhouse play between the pair and it’s all the more touching for being realistic.
There’s a tiny scene where one of the young hoods asks Nick to meet his mother, in the way of a young employee wanting to show off that he was working for a top man. And Nick also goes out of his way to praise what’s on offer at the fair from a couple of women anxious for praise.
One of the tests of a good actor is what they do when they enter an unfamiliar room. Your instinct and mine, like ordinary people, would be to look around not just lock eyes on the person you’ve come to meet. So when Poppy wakes up in a luxurious hotel room she doesn’t go into all that eye-rubbing nonsense, but instead marvels at her surroundings. And although she hangs on his every word – and his arm – Nick isn’t in the seduction business, instead spoiling the young woman with expensive clothes.
There are several other scenes elevated just by touches. The credit sequence ends with a shoe appearing among the meat being processed – Mary Ann’s victims don’t sleep with the fishes but with the sausages. Poppy recalls a childhood spent in a rural wonderland, squirrels, rabbits, the splendors of nature, and reveals a lesbian relationship with another orphan Violet that is the most innocent description of love and sexual exploration you’ll ever hear.
Violet is the victim of multiple rapists. Weenie has passed her onto a bunch of down-and-outs for the price of a nickel. When Nick unclenches her clenched fist you’ll be horrified to see how many nickels tumble out.
Lee Marvin (Point Blank, 1967) is at his laconic best and Sissy Spacek (Carrie, 1976) makes a notable debut but Gene Hackman (Downhill Racer, 1969) overplays his hand.
Director Michael Ritchie (Downhill Racer) was on a roll, following this with The Candidate (1972), Smile (1975), The Bad News Bears (1976) and Semi-Tough (1977) before the execrable The Island (1980) badly damaged his career.
Written by Robert Dillon (The French Connection II, 1975).
Trash and intentionally so, but with some unexpected merit. In the first place it was the forerunner of films set in the Deep South such as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Mississippi Burning (1988) and where the former deals primarily in racism the latter adds Civil Rights to the equation. More pertinently, and to save us according this more acclaim than it deserves, it was the beginning of the Women in Prison genre. Writers, generally, date Jess Franco’s 99 Women (1969) as the beginning of that genre, but that’s mostly because it clicked at the box office, thanks to liberated censorship permitting more exploitation license.
To put it crudely, this is straight exploitation but given more credence because it’s not as vivid sexually in its exploitation. There’s rape and by later standards that’s discreetly done but there’s a complete absence of nudity.
Jean (Julie Ange), Ted (Ron Segal) and African American Claude (James Harvey) are stopped for speeding in Carson Landing, and subsequently arrested. Sheriff Wymer (William Watson) beats up the men in turn, fines them $150, which, luckily they can pay. They are let go but shortly afterwards arrested again on the trumped up charge of prostitution (her) and violation of the Mann Act (the men) for transporting a sex worker across state lines.
Claude turns down the chance of freedom that would be granted should he agree to sign a confession put to him in seductive fashion by the Sheriff’s squeeze Nellie (Arlene Faber). The cops lure the guys into attempted escape by leaving a door open, which, as you might expect, results in their demise. Jean, who has the sense to not take the bait, is raped.
Jean is convicted nonetheless of prostitution and at her trial vents her feelings. “You’re nothing but a bunch of pigs and murderers…It takes a whole town plus a phony judge and jury to convict me,” she spouts.
There’s not much time for her to spend on the eponymous chain gang because she seems to spend most of her time chained up. But because she lacks a “way of showing her appreciation” and thus being rewarded with a softer job of cleaning or cooking, she’s eventually added to the chain gang. Luckily, on her first day out, another prisoner Henry (Tom Baker) helps her escape and they head for the swamps. He sacrifices himself to save her but not before showering the Sheriff with snakes. When Jean is found, she becomes a witness against the corrupt cops.
I doubt if writer-director Jess Gross (Teenage Mother, 1967) had anything more on his mind than making a quick buck in the grindhouse/drive-in exploitation market, and that anything prophetic was purely happenstance. Most movies around this time in that genre sold more on promise than what they could deliver, and he had made his marketing bones through the U.S. distribution of the first two Mondo Cane (1962/1963) films as a double bill. He only directed three pictures and was better known as a producer including the lurid Whirlpool (1969) and the more legitimate Blaxploitation Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadass Song (1971).
In part because of censorship prohibition, this carries some weight because more is imagined than shown, sexuality repressed rather than expressed, but that was not the case with violence and while it’s not marked by the bloodletting that would later be de rigeur the cops hand out some stiff beatings, exemplifying not just their racist credentials but their antipathy to liberals from the big city.
This didn’t prove a breakout movie for the stars although William Watson had a reasonable career as a tough guy – Lawman (1971), Chato’s Land (1972). Julie Ange and Ron Segal only made one more film, Teenage Mother. James Harvey didn’t make another. Arlene Faber was the star of Gross’s other two movies, the last being Female Animal (1970), and she had a small part in The French Connection (1971).
Absolutely mesmeric. Would be catnip for contemporary audiences with its shifting time frames, juggling perspectives, narrative sleight-of-hand, and heavily feminist-oriented outlook with its slating of misogyny. Ripe for a remake and with the adventurous directors around these days they should be vying for the opportunity. But I should warn you, steer clear of the version that showed on Amazon Prime which cut the four-part television series in half.
British screenwriter Dennis Potter was something of a national institution before this appeared, the BBC ponying up vast sums (in television terms) for his experimental programs that included the likes of Pennies from Heaven (1978) – remade as a movie three years later with Steve Martin – and The Singing Detective (1986) (remade seventeen years later with Robert Downey Jr) and his blend of pastiche and males struggling with raw emotion had made him not just a household name but accorded him worldwide acclaim.
However, just as Peeping Tom (1960) put the kibosh on the career of Michael Powell, Blackeyes proved a major critical reversal and after the mauling it received and outraged headlines in the national media Potter somewhat lost his mojo and automatic critical favor although Lipstick On Your Collar (1993) helped a certain Ewan McGregor to make his mark.
In part, Blackeyes is way ahead of its time in the use of the stylistic devices mentioned above which when incorporated into the works of, for example, David Lynch or Christopher Nolan, were hailed as groundbreaking.
So this is a three-hour-plus show setting precedents that not only break all the rules of narrative but blows them sky-high and has so many layers you can hardly keep up and that narrative spinning continues to the very end. You could almost entitle it “Whose Story Is It, Anyway?”
Elderly author Maurice (Michael Gough) has fashioned the experiences of his model niece Jessica (Carol Royle) into a bestselling literary novel. Leading character Blackeyes (Gina Bellman) is taken advantage of so often by men that she commits suicide, wading out dressed in sexy night attire into a lake. Although Maurice makes a fine specimen suited-and-booted and talking to admiring audiences at book fairs, in reality he’s a sodden old drunk living in a threadbare apartment with a teddy bear. But he’s intellectually adroit as shown with his verbal duels with a smug journalist who spouts artistic jargon.
Jessica is so annoyed that she has not been acknowledged as the source of her uncle’s novel – he claims it is a work of imagination – that she begins to write her own fictional version of her life story, calling into question some of the events in her uncle’s account. So that’s two perspectives already. Stand by for a third, that turns the entire story on its head.
It appears Blackeyes (Gina Bellman) has not committed suicide. Detective Blake (John Shrapnel) is convinced she has been murdered, especially after he finds a list of names stuck in her vagina (yes, despite Blake gamely searching for every euphemism under the sun, the actual word, to add to the shock and horror of an audience and especially critics reeling from the sex and nudity, was used on the BBC) and later finds her diary which provides another version of events.
He’s an old-school detective, and while not beating anyone up, not above handing out a good thump in the ribs to anyone giving him lip. So while following Maurice and his niece, we are also finding out more about Blackeyes via the cop’s investigations and how she was taken advantage of in the advertising profession and world of photographic modeling. She is even the one who gets the blame when someone tries to rape her.
Her life could be viewed in two ways, as a sexually independent woman or as a victim of MeToo.
To counteract what is presented as a sordid existence there comes into her life a gentler soul, advertising copywriter Jeff (Nigel Planer) and he’s writing and rewriting versions of a more old-fashioned romance where they enjoy a meet-cute (of sorts) and get talking and move onto romantic walks along the seaside. But Jeff’s too diffident a fellow to appeal to Blackeyes and he doesn’t even get to first base. But it also turns out that he’s been watching Jessica through binoculars (they live across the street from each other) and there’s a marvelous moment when he realizes that Blackeyes occupies the same apartment as Jessica and that he could at that very moment be watching himself.
All the way through there’s been a male voice-over, measured, commenting on the action, advising on twists in the story, adding a different perspective to characters, offering many polished bon mots, and it takes you quite a while to realize that this is an entirely new voice, and doesn’t belong to either Maurice or Jeff. In the ordinary run of things, this character would turn out to be the Hercule Poirot of the piece, putting the jigsaw together, explaining all.
In fact, he’s another element of the jigsaw. He’s not just the narrator. Everyone we’ve seen are characters in his fiction. But they don’t always obey the rules and at the very end Blackeyes escapes.
So just a stunning piece of television. Although Michael Gough (Batman Returns, 1992) received the bulk of what little plaudits there were, the series is carried by New Zealand actress Gina Bellman (Leverage, 2008-2012, and Leverage: Redemption, 2021-2023) who is simply superb. She rises above what could easily have been a cliché – and in some respects was written as a cliché version of the “dumb blonde” at male beck and call. Her comic timing for a start turns many scenes on their heads. But what’s often been overlooked is her transitional skill. She moves from male fantasy figure to believable human being and from there to rebel. And that takes some doing.
Gina Bellman hates talking about this series, my guess on account of the nudity and the backlash that created for a young actress, but she should be proud of her achievement. This is more than solid stuff.
Writer Dennis Potter also directed and his camera is always prowling around the edges.
The word auteur was over-used but this genuinely fits that category.
Ponderous, gratuitous, offensive. Let’s start with the pedophile, spoiled grandson Martin (Helmut Berger) of industrialist patriarch Joachim (Albrecht Schonhals). We already guess he has this kind of predilection for young girls as that’s suggested during a game of hide-and-seek at the family mansion and by a scream in the night that is ignored. He keeps a mistress Olga (Florinda Balkan) and is drawn to the young girl in the apartment next door, bringing her the kind of expensive present that her impoverished mother believes she must have stolen. So we know what he’s all about. It’s discreetly enough stated without the inclusion of a scene which I doubt would pass the censor these days and should the young actress be still alive in these MeToo times might be considering legal action for being taken advantage of.
Although the storyline is similar to the director’s earlier The Leopard (1963) of the powerful – there a wealthy landowner, here an arms manufacturer – trying to hold onto their status in times of change (then the invasion of Sicily by forces wanting to unite Italy, now the rise to eminence of Hitler), there’s little of the cinematic flair of the latter. Long scenes are played out at dinner tables or in bedrooms. And most of that is machination, someone or other wanting to take over the family firm or be the power behind the throne.
You need some knowledge of German history to understand the significance of some events. Hitler, then the German Chancellor, burned down the Reichstag (the German Parliament) in 1933 in a ruthless bid for power. Hitler employed two factions, the predominantly working class brownshirts (the SA) and the mainly middle class blackshirts (the SS), the former a paramilitary organization committed to actions against Jews and backing his early bid for power. In 1934, in the Night of the Long Knives, the SS obliterated the SA.
The first section of the picture straddles these two events with a Succession-style drama. In reaction to the burning of the Reichstag, Joachim replaces Herbert (Umberto Orsini), his top executive and outspoken anti-Nazi, with boorish nephew Konstantin (Reinhard Koldehoff) who is a high-ranking member of the SA.
This doesn’t sit well with Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), who expected preference. Urged on by lover Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), Joachim’s widowed daughter-in-law, and Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), Joachim’s nephew and an ambitious high-ranking SS official, Friedrich kills Joachim but pins the blame on Herbert who has to flee.
Konstantin is thwarted because although technically in charge it’s now Martin who owns the business and nudged by Sophie gives Friedrich the top management role. So Konstantin resorts to blackmail, having uncovered the pedophile. In steps Sophie who uses Aschenbach to thwart him again. Though there’s not much need because Konstantin is eliminated as one of the SA members executed in 1934 at some kind of gathering where the attendees all appear to have homosexual tendencies.
Aschenbach and Martin nurse grievances. Aschenbach feels Friedrich isn’t ostentatious enough in support of Hitler and Martin is furious that Sophie manipulated his difficulties with Konstantin to Friedrich’s benefit. So the SS man and the dissolute conspire. In the way of this kind of heightened melodrama it’s revealed that Friedrich killed Joachim. That doesn’t send Friedrich to trial, instead wins him a get-out-of-jail-free card by turning into a radical Nazi.
Martin, meanwhile, is also a member of the SS. He rapes Sophie, Friedrich loses his way and in one of those moments Francis Ford Coppola would appreciate Martin kills them on their marriage day.
There are a couple of oddities. It’s hard to believe a young girl – we’re talking a 7-8-year-old – would actually manage the mechanics of hanging herself. And when Friedrich is drawn into joining the slaughter of the SA members, there is over-emphasis on his perceived sensitivity when previously he had cold-bloodedly despatched Joachim.
So glorified soap opera with too much virtue signalling for its own good. Excepting Herbert and wife Elizabeth (Charlotte Rampling) and another grandson, who play minor roles, there’s not a single character to care for.
Despite the unusual backdrop, there’s nothing particularly unusual about the succession/inheritance scenario. The tough self-made millionaire or latest head of a wealthy family seeks to maintain power and guard against diminishing its status and lineage by ensuring the correct successor is groomed and that capital is not dissipated through unsuitable marriage or indulging weaker offspring. Thomas Mann, who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, covered this ground more successfully in his debut novel Buddenbrooks, although admittedly with less decadence.
Setting The Damned against the rise of the Nazis is an attempt to give it more artistic status than it merits because it’s really not much more than a standard study of ambition and ruthlessness.
You couldn’t make it like that now, so the ill-informed tale goes. Actors doing their own paddling in canoes, climbing a cliff. But anyone who has watched Leonard DiCaprio and Kate Winslet half-drowning in Titanic (1997) is well aware that it’s just not always possible to use a stand-in for key sequences. Or, for that matter, William Holden breaking in a horse in Wild Rovers (1971).
For a start, there actually were four stunt men on Deliverance, one who was star Jon Voigt’s stunt double. None were credited in the picture, not so unusual in those days, and anyone who knows anything about filming climbing scenes, not least the one where actors are actually crawling across a floor, or where there are, out of sight of cameras, safety facilities underneath, will know that the actors here, though it might get a tad tough, were not risking life and limb. Greater injuries were endured by the stars during the storm scenes of The Guns of Navarone (1961). That said, the movie does benefit from sufficient shots of the actors braving the waters and Ned Beatty nearly drowned and Burt Reynolds cracked his tailbone.
But, of course, danger in moviemaking is relative. There’s scarcely any equivalent to the numbers of deaths that occur in other professions, mining, for example, or industry, and I’m always suprised how easily the Hollywood PR machine is so easily accepted by the public when the peril mentioned is rarely actually perilous at all.
For the scene where the canoe broke, director John Boorman had found a more serene location on a river which was dammed, so he was able to close the sluice gates and lay a rail on the river bed. However, in the event, the sluice gates were opened too soon and the actors engulfed in an avalanche of water.
Should any of the actors show temerity, Boorman would leap into a canoe himself, and paddle downriver over and around various obstacles to show how easy it was.
Deliverance was an unexpected bestseller in 1970, the author an unlikely candidate to hit the commercial jackpot or even to pen such a tale. Ex-adman James Dickey was known for his poetry. Warner Bros bought the book pre-publication about “four decent fellows killing to survive” for $200,000 and more for Dickey to pen the screenplay without working out how it could be filmed. The studio was going through a major transition. In 1970 only three releases had cleared $1 million in rentals; in 1971 the number tripled and the studio was high on a release slate that included Death in Venice, A Clockwork Orange, Summer of ’42, Klute, The Devils, Dirty Harry and Billy Jack.
The studio alighted on John Boorman because he had made Hell in the Pacific (1968) starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, that, while a certified flop, was made under arduous physical conditions in the western Pacific.
After the surprise success of Point Blank, British director Boorman had helmed two flops, Leo the Last (1970) being the other, so he was in the market for the kind of hard-nosed project with which he had made his name. Warner “felt I was the man to take it on,” explained Boorman.
At one point, Warner Brothers planned to team up Jack Nicholson (hot after Easy Rider, 1969, and Carnal Knowledge, 1971) and Marlon Brando, still largely in the pre-The Godfather wilderness. The studio tried to tempt Charlton Heston, who turned it down (“I probably won’t have time to do it”) but consoled himself that WB considered him “employable.” Donald Sutherland also gave it a pass. Dickey agitated for Sam Peckinpah to direct and Gene Hackman to star while Boorman was keen to work a third time with Lee Marvin. Theoretically, Robert Redford, Henry Fonda, George C. Scott and Warren Beatty were considered, but such big names would hardly be compatible with the lean budget.
The final budget was a mere $2 million, not sufficient to attract big name – or even to pay for a score. WB had reservations about a picture without any women in lead roles. Jon Voigt was not a proven marquee name, despite the success of Midnight Cowboy (1969). He only had a bit part in Catch 22 (1970) and his other films, Out of It (1969) and The Revolutionary (1970) had performed dismally while The All-American Boy was sitting on the WB shelf, only winning a release to cash in on Deliverance.
Despite a less than buoyant career, Voigt was reluctant to commit. He resisted making the movie till the last minute. Even after trying to convince himself about the film’s worth by reading out the entire screenplay to his girlfriend Marcheline Bertrand (Angelina Jolie’s mother), it took a telephone call from the director and Boorman demanding a decision before he counted to ten before Voigt signed up. Voigt viewed the film as about how men “lose part of their manhood by hiding, coddling themselves into thinking we’re safe.”
Burt Reynolds was treading water in action B-films like Skullduggery (1970), as the second male lead in bigger films like 100 Rifles (1969) and in television (Dan August, 1970-1971). In his favor, he had the lead in offbeat cop picture Fuzz (1972). But it looks like Voigt and Reynolds took casting to the wire. Both were announced for the film a few weeks before it began shooting on May 17, 1971.
Whether it boosted his career is open to question, but Burt Reynolds’ name achieve notoriety in April 1972, a few months before Deliverance opened, by becoming the first male centerspread in Cosmopolitan. Billy Redden, as the banjo player, was hired for his physical appearance, clever use of the camera disguising the fact that there was a genuine banjo player concealed behind him doing all the playing. Boorman used snatches of the banjo music instead of coughing up for a proper score. While the credits claimed the “Dueling Banjos” number had been devised by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandel, Arthur Smith, writer of “Feudin’ Banjos” in 1955, took the studio to court and won a landmark copyright ruling. The tune had received a gold record for sales.
Setting aside any inherent danger in the water, the shore could just be as perilous. A script altercation between Dickey and Boorman ended with the director losing four teeth. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond got into a spat with his union and was slapped on the wrists for operating the camera too often. Filming of the rape scene was uncomfortable for all concerned, even observers. When Reynolds complained the director let the sequence last too long, Boorman countered that he let it run till he reckoned Reynolds, in his character, would intervene.
Despite WB including it in a promotion to its international partners in May 1971 Deliverance, filmed between May 17 – a week later than originally envisaged – and August 1971, sat on the shelf for nearly a year before being premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival in July 1972 with Playboy picking up the tab for flying Reynolds to the event.
These days it would be called a platform release. Deliverance opened in one small house in New York – the 558-seat Loews Tower East – at the end of July and except for Los Angeles didn’t go any wider until early October. Reviews were good, four faves out of five in New York. But it was the box office that caught the eye. An opening day record and an eye-popping $45,000 for the first week took the industry by surprise. It remained at Loews until December. Chicago led the applause in October with a “brawny” $49,000. Everywhere it was hot – “lusty” $26,000 in Washington DC, “socko” $21,000 in Philadelphia were typical examples of the public response.
In what these days would be called counter-programming it went into the New York showcases at Xmas – making off with a huge $589,000 from 46 the first week and $500,000 the second. WB had predicted it might hit $15 million in rentals. The studio was wrong. It scrambled up $21 million. The 1973 tally made it the second best at the box office that year.
SOURCES: Phil Hoad, “How We Made Deliverance,” The Guardian, May 29, 2017; Oliver Lyttleton, “5 Things You Might Not Know about Deliverance, Released 40 Years Ago,” IndieWire, July 30, 2012; Charlton Heston, The Actor’s Life (Penguin, 1980); “Bow and Arrow Party,” Variety, May 20, 1970, p30; “Dickey Ga-Bound,” Variety, January 21, 1971, p4; “Reps of 45 Flags,” Variety, April 14, 1971, p5; “Voigt in Deliverance,” Variety, May 12, 1971, p14; “Runaway Robert Altman,” Variety, December 15, 1971, p4; Advert, Variety, August 9, 1972, p23; “Big Rental Films of 1972,” Variety, Janaury 3, 1973, p7; “Big Rental Films of 1973,” Variety, January 9, 1974, p19. Box office figures from Variety October 11, 1972.
Packs a considerable punch even at the remove of half a century. In fact, the reversal of the ultimate male-domination trope – rape – will reverberate even more in a contemporary society more attuned to abuse. A quartet of macho posturing guys – except for one more at home overseeing a barbecue pit – not only get their come-uppance but have to sit on a very thin fence when the morality clause comes into play.
Much of the patronising attitudes towards the poor and bereft will not have evaporated with time. The better-educated, the very ones who should know better, still make fun of the less well-off and their accents – such scoffing by the privileged recently made headlines in the UK. The hillbillies represented here are not making fashion statements with their clothing or attribute their scrawny physiques to weight-loss therapy. This is poverty in the raw – and yet our quartet treat the wilds as a playground.
You want swagger?
Presumably expecting campfire singalongs Drew (Ronny Cox) has brought his guitar, forgetting it might not be so easily transported through the rapids, but he thinks he’s made contact with the inhabitants when he duets with a banjo player (Billy Redden). Macho Lewis (Burt Reynolds), easily identified as the toughest of the quartet by his visible chest hair and archery set, is at one with nature, assuming that the beasts he presumably intends to kill are okay with that. He believes he’s got one-up on the natives when he beats a local down to $40 for moving their cars to the finish-point, not considering for a moment that the fellow would probably have done it for half.
Ed (Jon Voigt) is the calm one, the peacemaker, keeping the volatile Lewis and the nervous Bobby (Ned Beatty), inclined to poke fun, in check. Turns out the locals don’t take kindly to this kind of invasion and two ambush Ned and Bobby, rape the former, but before they can work their way round to the latter, are interrupted by Lewis who puts an arrow through one of the mountain men. The toothless one escapes.
This is where it gets tricky. Lewis, inner Clint Eastwood to the fore, justifies his slaying. Chances are, if he’d fired a warning shot, the rapists would have scarpered. The chances, too, of Bobby reporting the crime are a big fat zero because the humiliation would be unendurable, even if the local cops accepted a crime like male rape even existed, and given the general lack of police interest in female rape no guarantee it would even be investigated.
Course, you kill one of “them” and you’re setting yourself up as a target for revenge. Our quartet would skedaddle but the only way out is downriver. Drew, in complete shock, topples overboard and drowns, the canoes crash into each other, Lewis breaks his leg, leaving Ed to lead them to safety.
He climbs a cliff, armed with the archery kit, in case they are being stalked by the other hillbilly. When he spots him, he fires, killing the hillbilly. So Ed has to get the injured Lewis and the useless Bobby to safety and hope nobody finds the bodies, one buried in the ground, the other dumped into the river. The cops do come calling, but the trio brave it out.
And the audience is left with a moral quandary – an even more resonant one these days. Are the killers morally justified? In, they presume, a lawless patch, where men are as likely to rape their own gender as women, are they permitted to take the law into their own hands? Stand up for themselves? Be a man? Rather than waiting for someone else to clean up their mess.
Or are they obnoxious over-entitled tourists who can pillage their way through the countryside? They had assumed that the hillbillies would not call in the law in case the cops were hunting for illicit stills. As if the mountain men didn’t have families who would hold them dear, no matter their crimes.
Sure, they get away with it, but don’t the rich always get off scot-free, one rule for the wealthy, another for the poor? Back in the day, I’m sure Americans feared these kinds of hinterlands, where mountain men ran wild, and the idea of ecology was a whistle in the wind. Our guys aren’t campaigning against the loss of the wilderness, but enjoying one last trip before the scenery is flooded.
Some standout moments – the duelling banjos (a hit single), “squeal like a pig,” the white water canoeing, Ed ramming his fingers in the corpse’s mouth to check for give-away missing teeth, the nightmare at the end that set a trend for what today would be termed a post-credit sequence.
Director John Boorman (Point Blank, 1972) easily sits astride his own fence. If all you’re looking for is action in an unusual setting and the Western trope of pacific man roused to anger, then you can go home happy. If you’re sniffing around for something deeper, for the ease with which the morally upright defend the indefensible, then you’ll have plenty to talk about. Poet James Dickey, author of the original unexpected bestseller, turned in the screenplay.
Unless you were unfortunate enough to get mix up in an international conspiracy, or your wealth induced a husband towards your murder – or a la Gaslight towards your insanity – or had taken a shower in strange motel, a wife in American movies was unlikely to live in fear of a sadistic spouse. Wife-beating aka wife-battering had never been high on the Hollywood agenda as an appropriate subject matter, so this picture not only stands out for the period but also strikes a contemporary spark. While many marital dramas of the 1960s have quickly become outdated, this has not.
Opening with an audacious cut from a woman’s eyes seen in a car’s rear-view mirror to her face in a photograph being pelted, being smashed to pieces. Ellen (Beverly Garland) has committed the grievous sin not just of going out to work but of taking up the post of secretary to oil executive Cliff Kane (Kenneth Tobey), a previous rival of husband Gerry (Skip Homeier). But Gerry’s income had unexpectedly tumbled and the couple, married just three years, need her money. He pours a drink over the terrified woman’s head, demands a divorce and promptly disappears.
Her search for him takes her to Quehada, pop. 976, a rundown town she had never heard of and whose existence her husband made no mention despite the fact it was where he grew up. Her husband’s sleazy friend Harvey takes her to the grave of Gerry’s mother (also called Ellen) where he rapes and beats her while, unbeknownst to her, her husband watches.
Back at the office, she begins to fall for Cliff, but Gerry, even though he no longer wants her, sets out to destroy the budding romance.
Following the classic pattern of course Ellen blames herself for making Gerry unhappy and for getting raped. Her guilt fuels her husband’s sadistic streak. She is unsure whether the threat of divorce is just the most cruel taunt her husband can imagine or for real, which would be just as bad, given her low-self-esteem.
Once she realizes Gerry had an unhappy childhood and is mother-fixated, it makes it even harder for her to abandon him, regardless of the mental and physical torment he inflicts and despite the entreaties of social worker friend Ruth (Hannah Stone). Ruth, too, however, represents an alternative equally fearful future, the now-single woman who regrets separating too quickly from her husband and has no man in her life or none who come up to scratch.
This is not a picture where men come out well. Gerry is a fiend in a suit. On the way to Quehada she is groped by other men who clearly feel it is their right. Harvey has a history of just taking what he wants. Even the relatively gentle Cliff appears to have an underlying reason for taking an interest in her.
In a world and a time where marriage meant not just financial security, but a safe haven from all the other men who would like as not press themselves upon the opposite sex at any opportunity, and not necessarily with any delicacy, director Ned Hockman presents life as a succession of traps for women. And we know now that not much has changed, and that for women fear is a constant.
Hockman directs with some singularity. He uses black-and-white not quite in the film noir manner of shadows and shafts of light but sets the subject of any night scene in a pool of light with darkness all around, which makes for some striking images. A couple of unusual backdrops include Commanche tribal dancing and a chase in a jukebox museum help place this a couple of notches above the usual B-picture.
Beverly Garland was a 1950s B-picture sci-fi and horror scream queen in movies such as It Conquered the World (1956), Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956) and Not of This Earth (1957) so fear was something of a default. Here, she adds something else, desolation at the position she finds herself in, confusion that her marriage is in tatters, hunting for a solution that never emerges, and unable to summon up the anger that might free herself. Hannah Stone has an intriguing role, encouraging her friend to leave her husband, knowing that being single again is not all it is cracked up to be. Unusually for a minor character in this kind of picture, primarily there to shore up the star, she enjoys a spot of lifestyle reversal.
The Magnificent 60s 