Bird-Watching

What I’ve Been Watching: Three Days of the Condor (1975).

Who’s Responsible: Sydney Pollack (director), Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel (screenwriters), Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Cliff Robertson (stars).

Why I Watched It: I like to revisit it periodically.

Seen It Before? Yes, several times.

Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10): 8.

Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10): 2.

Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10): 7.

And? Joe Turner (Redford) is a mild-mannered CIA analyst who returns from buying lunch for his colleagues at the Manhattan brownstone housing their front, the American Literary Historical Society, only to find that they have been brutally gunned down during his brief absence. For years, I have argued that those who considered Redford too much of a pretty boy to be taken seriously as an actor would do well to study his reactions here, as they escalate from shock and horror to fear for his own life and the grim determination that he is not going to be next. This sequence is a tour de force in many ways, but for me at least, the film falls into the unusual trap of never living up to those first twenty minutes.

Turner’s job is to read omnivorously, sifting through novels and articles and feeding them into a computer in search of security leaks or new ideas, and he has recently run across a mystery novel with a very curious publication history. It’s now clear that his dismissed report struck a nerve somewhere in Langley, having unwittingly uncovered something worth wiping out the ALHS, and Turner—code-named Condor—is instantly suspicious when he speaks with Deputy Director Higgins (Robertson). These suspicions are in no way allayed when his last surviving colleague, who called in sick, is killed in his home, and an attempt to bring Condor in from the cold, via a rendezvous with his section chief and an old friend, goes south in the worst way, with Turner framed for his friend’s death.

A lethal game of cat and mouse ensues as Turner, unable to trust anyone he knows, forces himself into the company of a total stranger, Kathy Hale (Dunaway), first to take refuge in her home and then, as they establish a gradual rapport, to enlist her active assistance. The very fact that Turner is an analyst rather than a field agent gives him an unexpected advantage, both because of the arcane knowledge he has assimilated over the years and because his status as an amateur makes his moves unpredictable. With Kathy’s help, he moves back and forth between New York and Washington, D.C., as he tries to get to the bottom of the mystery and avoid getting killed by Joubert (the great Max Von Sydow), a freelance assassin and sometime Company employee who oversaw the hit on the ALHS.

Although I have qualified admiration for this film, I damn it with faint praise by saying that it’s my favorite among the seven that Redford made with Pollack, ranging from the classic Out of Africa (1985) to the soporific Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and the unbearable The Way We Were (1973). If you said that their joint filmography did not augur well for a spy thriller, you’d be right, and my primary objection to the opening sequence is that the main-title theme by Dave Grusin (a lightweight if ever there was one) is too upbeat for the mayhem to follow. Likewise, by the time he shot Condor, Owen Roizman was already the cinematic poet laureate of ’70s New York for The French Connection (1971) and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), yet this Manhattan lacks their edge.

It’s interesting to note that the screenplay tries to amp up the tension by halving the time-frame in James Grady’s 1974 source novel, Six Days of the Condor, and the filmmakers were clearly going for a Hitchcock vibe with that whole “an innocent man running for his life must earn the trust, and the heart, of a random woman” thing. But sadly, my lifelong antipathy for Dunaway—whose films such as The Three and Four Musketeers (1973 and 1974), Chinatown (1974), and Network (1976) I loved in spite of, rather than because of, her—blinds me to any chemistry they might have achieved. By the way, I wrote my very first press release for Grady’s 1985 novel Hard Bargains, and he was very kind to a wet-behind-the-ears publicity assistant at his first real job (at Macmillan) in the big, bad city.

Overall, I found the film a little too slick for its gritty subject matter, which is perhaps not surprising coming from impresario Dino De Laurentiis, but Von Sydow predictably tries to make the most of his limited role, and I suppose that Robertson, who always seemed a little sketchy to me, is well cast as a guy who may or may not be trustworthy, interacting nicely with boss John Houseman. This is certainly one of the better efforts from Semple, whose work oscillated from the height of the superior political thriller The Parallax View (1974) to the depths of Flash Gordon (1980) and Never Say Never Again (1983); Rayfiel worked on the Elmore Leonard adaptation Valdez Is Coming (1971). Someday, I’ll have to compare this with Grady’s book and check out his 1978 sequel, Shadow of the Condor.

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They’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad

What I’ve Been Watching: Kansas Pacific (1953).

Who’s Responsible: Ray Nazarro (director), Dan Ullman (screenwriter), Sterling Hayden, Eve Miller, and Barton MacLane (stars).

Why I Watched It: Hayden.

Seen It Before? No.

Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10): 6.

Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10): 4.

Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10): 7.

And? If you were going to make a Western in 1953, as Allied Artists did here, you could do a whole lot worse than entrust it to Nazarro and Ullman. The former directed scores of oaters on the large and small screens between 1945 and 1960, while the latter’s rather more diverse output also encompassed such SF offerings as The Maze (1953), BOF fave Mysterious Island (1961), and episodes of such genre series as The Outer Limits (“Cold Hands, Warm Heart”). As often noted, I watch Westerns less omnivorously, so I need a hook like a particular star or filmmaker, but we need look no further than General Jack D. Ripper himself, Sterling Hayden, who would star in Nazarro’s Top Gun two years later.

Just before the Civil War, “Bleeding Kansas” is still torn apart by pro- and anti-slavery factions, while the newly formed Confederacy is keenly aware that the Kansas Pacific Railroad now under construction will form a vital supply line for the Union’s Western outposts. Neither side wants to be responsible for starting a shooting war, so the Union declines to send troops to protect the crews, while the Confederates do everything they can—short of killing, at first—to stop them. Into this powderkeg is thrust Captain John Nelson (Hayden), an Army engineer sent undercover to help boss Cal Bruce (MacLane), his daughter, Barbara (Miller), and his train engineer pal, Smokestack (Harry Shannon).

Since the true nature of Nelson’s mission is on a need-to-know basis, the Bruces are, not surprisingly, under the misimpression that he is there to take Cal’s job, and they almost head back East, but Smokestack persuades them that with war imminent, this is no time to turn quitters. MacLane—whom I first saw as the abrasive cop Dundy in The Maltese Falcon (1941)—played so many pills in his career, and played them so well, that when I saw how prominently he was billed, I assumed he would be the villain, and I was thrilled that he got to be a good guy for a change. In fact, one of this film’s greatest pleasures is seeing him slowly begin to trust Nelson…albeit faster than love-interest Barbara, natch!

In a nice touch, when Nelson first gets to town, he sees Bill Quantrill (Reed Hadley) get attacked by three ruffians who want to run him out of town; gentleman that he is, Nelson steps in to even the odds, unaware that he’s assisting the incognito leader of the very men opposing him. In an economical 73 minutes, Ullman skillfully sketches the escalation of the hostilities between the two sides; the growing camaraderie between Nelson and the railroad crew; and his rapport with the Bruces. Smokestack adds an acceptable level of comic relief, annoying Cal with his omnipresent pipe, and several familiar faces round out the cast, including James Griffith and villains Douglas Fowley and Myron Healey.

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Chicks in Action Flicks, Part I

A GUEST POST BY ALEXANDRA BRADLEY

 

A while back, Daddy BOF invited me to write a guest post for his blog, and though I graciously accepted the challenge, I had an extremely difficult time coming up with a topic. What could I, with half as many years of experience as he has, add to this blog that my movie buff father could not say better and with more nuanced accuracy?  After months (literally) of pondering this issue, I was suddenly struck with inspiration thanks to our outing to see Prometheus a few weeks ago. What better perspective could I bring to a film that my father cannot than that of being a female viewer? With many discussions on this very topic with my father already under my belt, I felt confident that I could bring something to the table. 

 

So, with all that in mind, here is the first entry of my wild and crazy thoughts about movies through the eyes of a female viewer. In honor of my Prometheus inspiration and because it is probably the easiest genre through which to introduce my point, I have decided to begin the discussion with action films. Take from this what you will, and I welcome any and all productive discussion on the topic.  Just be nice to me; it’s my first time blogging ever!

 

Hugs and kisses, Alexandra

 

Part I: Where Alexandra explains the source of the problem

 

As the years go by and my understanding of the world around me rapidly develops, I am becoming more and more of a feminist.  And for those of you who still think that means that I am using The SCUM Manifesto [immortalized in I Shot Andy Warhol —BOF] as my “bible,” let me clarify that I call myself a feminist because I am an advocate for equality and social change, not a raging lunatic.

 

Anyway, with this developing mindset, I have had a hard time reconciling my values with my deep affection for horror, sci-fi, and even (the few good) action films to which my excellent father introduced me.  You see, it’s very hard as a woman to watch a classic horror flick and leave feeling your value is any greater than a pair of breasts posed to be torn into by some weirdo’s knife, or to watch an action movie where you’re not seducing somebody (or being seduced by them), or to watch any of these films where you’re the one saving the day and not being saved by the big handsome man. 

 

Are there exceptions to this problem?  Oh, most certainly yes. As a matter of fact, Daddy BOF and I have had many a conversation about the various kick-ass female characters of recent years, and he was very surprised to learn that his normally “let’s go women!” daughter did not automatically fall in love with any film that featured a female protagonist, even if she was a seemingly rocking chick. The problem is, unfortunately, that most of the exceptions aren’t much better than the rule.

 

“But why?!?!  Why, oh, why is Tomb Raider not going to be totally up your alley?” he asked, far less dramatically in real life.

 

Well, the response to that question is surprisingly difficult to put into words.  However, I strongly believe that the root of these differences can be traced back to something as simple as why the character was created to be a female. 

 

In the Lara Croft/Wonder Woman/Charlie’s Angels/Catwoman category, the characters’ problems lie not in their being written by men, but in their being written for men, and mainly fan-boys at that. Just taking one look at any of these characters (go ahead, look up a picture or two) tells me a lot of what I need to know. Sporting the skimpiest costumes or the tightest bodysuits ever made, these women race around the world fighting crime or whatever they do without so much as a stray hair (a real one, not that very-well-planned one they used for Angelina Jolie) or a smear of their eye liner. Everything about them drips with sexuality, and the fact that they are running around beating up on bad guys is just another way to make their sex appeal bounce up another level. And considering they are not written to be women we can look up to or who do amazing things or who have any kind of true strength to them or even a real personality, you can forget about it if you expect them to look like real women.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong:  I have nothing against the existence of these movies and characters per se. You gentlemen don’t get a complete monopoly on enjoying fun, frivolous, and/or adrenaline-boosting flicks, nor do you have one on appreciating how sexy fill in female action star’s name here looks in that oh-so-revealing outfit.  My point is merely to explain why I’m not going to herald Angelina Jolie as the next role model for our young girls (or any females, for that matter) to look up to for setting the standards of how to be a strong woman.

 

“So what is the alternative?” you ask.  Well, I happen to have one very specific example in mind.  You see, there are a few action ladies out there for whom I have an immense amount of respect, and I cannot think of a better example than the character I consider the greatest female badass of all time: Ellen Ripley.

 

But you’ll have to wait to find out why….

 

Tune in next time to find out more about why Alien rocks my socks in Part II: Why Ellen Ripley is the cat’s pajamas, and other stories.

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Memorial Day Viewing Guide

Comme d’habitude, Turner Classic Movies will salute—pun intended—the sacrifice and bravery of our fighting men and women with its annual 48-hour Memorial Day weekend war-movie marathon, but this year, without even consulting me, they have scheduled six of my favorite films ever (not just war movies, mind you, but movies in general, as demonstrated by the fact that together they constitute 6% of the B100), back to back, for more than sixteen hours of World War II wonderment on Monday. Personally, I can think of no better way to spend the day, but I’ll be remembering in my own way with a visit to Alexandra in Washington, D.C., in the company of the two Mrs. Bradleys; luckily, I own all of these movies, and am already half-way through a pre-emptive strike with The Guns of Navarone. For those of you lucky enough to kick back with a big bucket of KFC and some TCM, here’s a handy-dandy viewing guide, with newly expanded versions of my B100 reviews, and as I look over this list, I guess it says something about me that almost none of these is a traditional flag-waver (Navarone probably comes closest)…but isn’t making you stop and think about war what Memorial Day is all about?

• Where Eagles Dare (11:45 AM): Quite simply The Greatest Movie Ever Made. Okay, I’m kidding, but it is my personal favorite. Only Alistair MacLean could have concocted this complex tale of triple agents, centering on a commando mission ostensibly to rescue an American general, who knows the details of the D-Day invasion plans, from an inaccessible Bavarian chateau! (I’ve always loved my war movies tinged with espionage, and when he was on his game—which wasn’t always—MacLean was unmatched at that.) Only Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood (in perhaps his only true second-banana role, for which he reportedly requested less dialogue), and the ill-fated Mary Ure could play the stalwart leads, who massacre countless German soldiers with only one flesh wound among them! Only Ferdy Mayne (The Fearless Vampire Killers, The Vampire Lovers), Anton Diffring (The Man Who Could Cheat Death), Donald Houston (reunited with Burton from The Longest Day), and Derrin Nesbitt could play the nasty Nazi villains! Only Brian G. Hutton could direct the exciting action scenes, including the famous cable-car fight! Only Ron Goodwin could compose the rousing, unforgettable score; I even have the soundtrack album on both LP and CD! I also have a first edition of the novel (based on MacLean’s script, but published before the film was released, resulting in decades of chicken-vs.-egg confusion), and even the spot-on Mad magazine parody, “Where Vultures Fare.”
• The Guns of Navarone (2:30 PM): Immortalized by the very youthful Alexandra as Guns Forever Known. Considering the subsequent and steady decline of director/boozer J. Lee Thompson’s career (e.g., the staggeringly inept Messenger of Death), this is astonishingly good, the first of the MacLean adaptations and one of those that holds up the best. It was, I believe, also the first of the big-budget, star-studded WW II films that were as much rousing adventure as searing drama (like, say, The Bridge on the the River Kwai), and I also think of it as a prototype for the specialized-manly-men-on-a-mission tales like Richard Brooks’s Western The Professionals. Stalwart Gregory Peck, formidable Anthony Quinn, and dubious David Niven join Irene Papas and commandos Anthony Quayle, Stanley Baker, and James Darren on the usual impossible mission on a German-held Greek island during WWII. Not many action films make me mist up, but this one has a beautifully reflective coda, featuring the softer side of Dimitri Tiomkin’s majestic score, that gets me every time. Despite being directed by Guy (Goldfinger) Hamilton, the belated sequel, Force 10 from Navarone (with Robert Shaw and Edward Fox highly unlikely in the Peck and Niven roles, plus Harrison Ford and The Spy Who Loved Me‘s Barbara Bach), is vastly inferior, I’m sorry to say, so stick with the original.
• The Dirty Dozen (5:15 PM): Robert Aldrich directed this unconventional and influential war movie, based on E.M. Nathanson’s fine novel. Lee Marvin has the unenviable task of trying to forge twelve convicts into a viable fighting unit for a suicide mission in occupied France on the eve of D-Day. The superb cast is full of up-and-coming stars, and includes Donald Sutherland (“Never heard of it”), Charles Bronson (the only member of both The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven), Telly Savalas (unforgettable as the psychotic Maggott), Jim Brown (MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra), John Cassavetes (Rosemary’s Baby), and Clint Walker among the dozen, plus Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, Ralph Meeker (Kiss Me Deadly), and Richard Jaeckel. Aldrich’s trademark genre-subverting style is in full force here, especially with the Last Supper homage, as he makes us root for these misanthropic misfits, and yet, as in The Wild Bunch, these criminals have their own sometimes admirable code of honor.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai (8:00 PM): No offense to Lawrence of Arabia, but I think this is David Lean’s greatest film. It swept the major Oscars (obviously excepting Best Actress) and deserved all of them. William Holden and Oscar-winner Alec Guinness are at their stellar best as, respectively, an American who leads a demolition team back to the Japanese POW camp from which he’s just escaped, and the British colonel who wages a war of wills with the commandant (Oscar nominee Sessue Hayakawa) and ends up taking too much pride in the bridge his men are building. Originally omitted from the credits in favor of Pierre Boulle (author of Planet of the Apes, oddly enough), who wrote the novel, blacklisted screenwriters Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman (The Guns of Navarone) received posthumous Oscars in 1984. The ending is somewhat different from Boulle’s but, not surprisingly, more cinematic. Holden has always been one of my favorites, especially here and in The Wild Bunch, and the ferocity with which he delivers his unforgettable speech to Jack Hawkins (“You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman—how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being!”) still gives me a frisson. With James Donald (Quatermass and the Pit, The Great Escape), Hammer mainstay André Morell, and superb music by Malcolm Arnold (who seemed to quote it in every other damn picture he scored!).
• The Great Escape (11:00 PM): Turafish considers this The Greatest Movie Ever Made. I won’t go that far, but it’s right up there. Director John Sturges, composer Elmer Bernstein, and cast members Steve McQueen (who, typically, demanded that his part be beefed up to include the famous motorcycle chase), Bronson, and James Coburn are reunited from The Magnificent Seven for this true story co-scripted by James Clavell. During World War II, the Germans decide to place all of their rotten eggs in one basket by herding their most troublesome prisoners into a single camp. Naturally, this leads to a legendary, albeit only partly successful, mass breakout led by “Big X” (Richard Attenborough). The theme song is unforgettable and the cast (also including James Garner, Donald Pleasence, David McCallum, and Gordon Jackson) is unparalleled. Not everyone would probably consider this a war movie, since the cast spends most of its time in a POW camp rather than in combat, but the point is made that by forcing the Germans to devote time and manpower to trying to round up the escapees, they’re keeping them away from the front lines. Besides, for many, being a prisoner of war is part of being a soldier, which is something we would do well to remember on this of all days. “Two hundred and fifty? You’re crazy—you, too.”
• Kelly’s Heroes (2:00 AM): Eastwood was reunited with Where Eagles Dare director Hutton for this humorous caper film with a World War II setting and a Vietnam-era sensibility, filmed in Yugoslavia, where they still had lots of vintage military hardware available (future director John Landis was a young PA on the film). The members of Clint’s platoon have been getting the short end of the stick since they hit the beach at Omaha, so when they learn of a fortune in Nazi gold kept in a bank behind enemy lines in occupied France, they decide to do a little extracurricular activity (a plot borrowed for the Gulf War film Three Kings). With a stellar cast (Savalas, Sutherland, Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor), excellent dialogue courtesy of the late Troy Kennedy Martin, an outstanding score by Lalo Schifrin, and a Leone/Wild Bunch parody. Along with The Dirty Dozen, this is clearly the most cynical of our little sextet, yet the cost of war is not ignored (I’m thinking in particular of the poignant aftermath of the minefield sequence, which always chokes me up), while those who enjoy slam-bang battle scenes will not be disappointed, and overall it makes some keen observations about the regular joes at the sharp end of war. Relax and enjoy.

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Night Moves

What I’ve Been Watching: Into the Night (1985).

Who’s Responsible: John Landis (director), Ron Koslow (screenwriter), Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Richard Farnsworth (stars).

Why I Watched It: Underdog favorite.

Seen It Before? Many times.

Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10): 10.

Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10): 5.

Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10): 8.

And? I periodically revisit Trading Places (1983) and Coming to America (1988) as a reminder that both Landis and Eddie Murphy once made excellent (and successful, which is not the same thing) movies; this was among the mixed bag of projects Landis worked on in between those hits. It was his first feature after the debacle of Twilight Zone—The Movie (1983), which may have contributed to what I believe was its commercial failure. Right from Ira Newborn’s main-title theme—sung by B.B. King, whose spirited rendition of “In the Midnight Hour” over the closing credits brackets the movie—this has a funky, bluesy vibe aptly suited to its offbeat, underused leading man, whom I’ve always loved.

Ed Okin (Goldblum) has a boring job in the aerospace industry and chronic insomnia—even before learning that his wife is cheating on him—which he offsets with late-night visits to the airport. During one such visit, a screaming woman, Diana (Pfeiffer), lands on the hood of his car, fleeing the four Iranian thugs who have just killed her companion, and after she climbs inside, Ed sensibly beats a hasty retreat. This sets in motion a series of chases and confrontations that need not be enumerated in specific detail but display the Hitchcockian devices of an ordinary guy whose life is threatened when he is caught up in extraordinary events and an obligatory MacGuffin: six priceless and smuggled emeralds.

Aptly, Landis gives himself a non-English-speaking role as one of the thugs, but also, in the spirit of ’80s excess, casts an amazing number of fellow filmmakers in parts ranging from cameos to full-fledged supporting roles. These include Jack Arnold, Rick Baker, Paul Bartel, David Cronenberg (who directed Goldblum in The Fly), Jonathan Demme, the dreaded Carl Gottlieb (who, per Richard Matheson, ruined his script for Jaws 3-D), Jim Henson, Lawrence Kasdan (who directed Goldblum in The Big Chill), Paul Mazursky, Daniel Petrie, Waldo Salt, Don Siegel, and Roger Vadim. Ed and Diana also encounter David Bowie, Irene Papas, Carl Perkins (in his only film), and various federal agents, many of whom manage to wipe one another out by the film’s sanguinary climax.

The other vein the story taps into is The Maltese Falcon, because the dialogue repeatedly implies that, like Dashiell Hammett’s Brigid O’Shaugnessy, Diana is a femme fatale who will bed and manipulate any man who can be of use to her, with Ed ready to follow in the fatal footsteps of his predecessor at the airport. But Pfeiffer, in one of her earliest leading roles, is luminous and loopy and endearing enough that we’re relieved, if not surprised, to find out that she’s a bit better than that. She spends much of the movie trying to contact a friend and possible Sugar Daddy with the improbable name of Jack Caper (the ever-great Farnsworth), from whom she is now being blocked by his greedy wife, Joan (Vera Miles).

It’s a mystery to me why this film didn’t do better, and when Madame BOF watched the second half with me the other night after we finished an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (her new favorite viewing ritual), she agreed with me. I hadn’t seen it for a while, after watching it repeatedly as cinematic comfort food back in the day, but it held up as well as ever; Goldblum’s non sequiturs are hilarious, and Pfeiffer is utterly disarming in moments like the stray shot of her apparently inserting her diaphragm (?!). The film also contains one of my all-time favorite lines when Ed asks Fed Clu Gulager, “Are we under arrest, or what?,” and he gruffly responds, “I’d say you fall into the ‘or what’ category.”

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Anger Management

On Saturday, we went to our other favorite city, New York, for dinner with our good friends Dan and Marie Scapperotti (he late of Cinefantastique and Femme Fatales fame) and the Roundabout revival of the seminal “angry young man” play, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. This is the first time I’ve caught any of Osborne’s work onstage, although I’d seen the screen adaptations of both that and The Entertainer made by Woodfall Productions, the company Osborne formed with Liam Neeson’s father-in-law, Tony Richardson, who had directed both plays. The films teamed Richardson and Osborne—who later scripted Tom Jones (1963) for Woodfall—with future Bond producer Harry Saltzman, co-scenarist Nigel Kneale, and crack cinematographer Oswald Morris.

The 1959 film of Anger reunited Richardson with Mary Ure, who had created the role of Alison Porter in London and earned a Tony nomination when she played it on Broadway, also matching Richard Burton with Ure and Claire Bloom, his respective leading ladies in Where Eagles Dare (1968) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). Osborne left his wife for Ure, who then divorced him to marry frequent co-star Robert Shaw, who then cheated on her with his secretary; Ure’s unhappy life ended in 1975, at 42, with an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates. Because the play kicked off British “kitchen sink” realism—e.g., Woodfall’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961)—I was hungry for the full impact of seeing it live.

The play relentlessly dramatizes the emotional wounds inflicted upon one another by Alison; her trumpet-playing husband, Jimmy; their flatmate, Cliff, with whom Jimmy runs a candy store; and her actress friend, Helena. It’s grueling (we later learned that a friend from our church choir had walked out of the matinee with his wife that very day!), but the cast—especially Matthew Rhys, who as Jimmy resembled and at times seemed to be channeling fellow Welshman Burton—was electrifying and the staging brilliant. The set was only about four feet deep; as an actor, I’d be in constant terror of falling off, yet it evoked the claustrophobic flat where one could scarcely move without touching another person, visualizing what Cliff calls “a very narrow strip of plain hell.”

Addendum: Remember my repeated threats—er, promises—that my contributions to Marvel University would continue to increase? Well, I’m making good on those by taking the point (i.e., providing the synopses and primary analysis) on one of my all-time favorite strips, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., which at its peak reached unsurpassed brilliance under writer/artist Jim Steranko. So check out today’s post, as the strip debuts alongside the equally classic Stan Lee/Steve Ditko Dr. Strange in Strange Tales #135, and in the immortal words of Agent Jasper Sitwell, “Don’t Yield—back S.H.I.E.L.D.!”

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Tailor Made

I had a lot of good food when the two Mrs. Bradleys and I visited my daughter in Washington, D.C., over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, where our whirlwind itinerary—with which the senior Mrs. B was hard pressed to keep up!—included the Washington, Lincoln, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, and MLK monuments, plus one building of the National Gallery. Some of said food was prepared by Alexandra herself, at the apartment Madame BOF found for her and boyfriend Thomas on Connecticut Avenue, with which they’ve done wonders during their relatively brief time there so far, and where she finally introduced the Moms to one of her favorite films, Moulin Rouge! But the best meal I had was a delicious helping of crow called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

I’ve long called the 1979 miniseries based on John le Carré’s novel one of the best adaptations of anything, anywhere, ever, inspiring me to read the book, one of my Top 10, and most of his other adventures of “incongruous spy” George Smiley. I’ve watched Alec Guinness as Smiley in both the miniseries and its 1982 sequel, Smiley’s People, countless times, and despite running times of more than five hours apiece, I found them utterly riveting, to say nothing of flawlessly capturing le Carré’s characters and plots. So when I heard that this satisfyingly complex Cold War thriller was being boiled down into a two-hour feature—even one starring the formidable Gary Oldman and directed by Sweden’s Tomas Alfredson, of Let the Right One In fame—I was utterly aghast.

But then I heard about some of the other casting (John Hurt as Smiley’s erstwhile boss, Control, and Colin Firth as Bill Haydon), and I got a little encouraged, and then I read some of those rave reviews, and I started to wonder if they could really pull it off. So, is it as good or as rich as the miniseries? No. Does Oldman incarnate Smiley-as-flesh the way Guinness did, so successfully that le Carré said he could no longer write him without seeing Guinness in his mind? No. Did a superb cast and crew—including Oldman—bring to life a script (by a couple of which the wife, sadly, died before its release) that manages to distill the essence of le Carré’s epic of espionage, in the process creating a breathtakingly excellent film that is top-notch on all levels? Hell yeah.

Here’s the set-up: Control sends Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Budapest to meet a Hungarian defector who will reveal the identity of a mole, or double agent, in the highest echelon of British intelligence (aka the Circus). The suspects are Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Haydon, and Control’s right-hand man, Smiley. When the report comes in that Prideaux has been shot dead, Control and Smiley are tossed out in favor of Alleline’s gang of four, but after Control dies and AWOL Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) resurfaces with a story about a mole, the reluctant Smiley is brought out of retirement by bureaucrat Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), who oversees the Circus, to pick up the trail where Control left off.

Smiley recruits Tarr’s boss, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), a protégé of George’s whom the Alleline regime had shunted off to a backwater division called the Scalphunters, and Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack), a retired Special Branch man he’d met on an earlier case. He calls upon the memories of similarly disfavored Circus vets Jerry Westerby (Stephen Graham)—an amalgam of the eponymous character and le Carré’s Sam Collins—and research expert Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke) to help him sift through the facts and lies. Among the casualties of the shorter format are George’s serial-adulterer wife, Ann (Katrina Vasilieva), and nemesis, Karla, neither of whom we see in full, although in general, the screenwriters preserve that which is most essential to the tale.

Those in our party who had seen the miniseries felt that the film might actually appeal more to viewers already familiar with the story, who would appreciate the foreshadowings and nuances, but of course it’s impossible for us to see it through virgin eyes. And, aside from the inevitable compression, it was interesting to see the choices they made, with this version depicting or even creating some things the original did not; I only noticed two notable instances of stuff that I don’t remember from either the book or the miniseries, but won’t reveal them here. As with the show, there were many unfamiliar names and/or faces in the cast, though I recognized Jones as the guy who played Arnim Zola in Captain America, mostly because he looks like a Jack Kirby creation!

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Thirty Little Indians

Thinking—as we often do—of our friend Maria Towers, Madame BOF and I recently unwound after a hectic evening with the 1965 version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, produced by Maria’s late husband, Harry Alan Towers. Next to the Fu Manchu movies with Christopher Lee, this was Harry’s most durable property, which he remade in 1974, and again in 1989. Variously published as Ten Little Niggers and And Then There Were None, the title under which it was first adapted by René Clair in 1945, this ingeniously constructed 1939 whodunit is essentially bullet-proof, so that if you have a decent script (supplied in this case by Harry, under his Peter Welbeck nom d’écran, and Peter Yeldham), a good cast, and a competent crew, you can hardly go wrong.

That was certainly so here and in Peter Collinson’s ’74 version with Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Richard Attenborough, Charles Aznavour, Herbert Lom, former Bond villains Adolfo Celi and Gert Fröbe, and Maria herself. I can’t vouch for the widely panned 1989 version, shot in Africa by Alan Birkinshaw—who made two low-rent Edgar Allan Poe films during the same period—with its limited star power provided by Lom (in a different role this time) and Donald Pleasence. Interestingly, according to the IMDb, the ’89 version was originally supposed to have utilized the ending of the novel, which is downbeat but intellectually satisfying, yet ultimately opted, as did all earlier films, for the happier outcome Christie herself had devised for her 1943 stage version.

’65 director George Pollock was certainly no stranger to this territory, having helmed all four of the films in which Margaret Rutherford played Christie’s Miss Marple. Television vet Yeldham was a frequent collaborator of Harry’s, as was cinematographer Ernest Steward, who worked on the first two Fu Manchu films, as well as the cult favorite The Avengers and innumerable entries in the “Doctor” and “Carry On” comedy series. The jaunty score by Malcolm Lockyer—another Towers regular, who also contributed to Peter Cushing’s Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965), Island of Terror (1966), and Island of the Burning Damned (1967)—takes a very different tack than the tingling 1974 music by Ennio Morricone protégé Bruno Nicolai, keeping things light and breezy.

Soon-to-be love interests Hugh O’Brian and Shirley Eaton arrive at an Austrian house accessible only by cable car—subbing for Christie’s remote island, inaccessibility being essential—with six other guests and married housekeepers Mario Adorf and Marianne Hoppe. We learn that none of them have met their host/employer, “U.N. Owen” (get it?), and most were lured there under false pretenses, also largely strangers to one another. An audiotape in the uncredited but unmistakable voice of Towers mainstay Lee (succeeded by Orson Welles in ’74) accuses each one of causing a death that is beyond the reach of the law, and it soon becomes clear that the elusive “Mr. Owen” has brought them there to administer his own brand of justice by executing them for their crimes.

In each guest’s room is a copy of the titular nursery rhyme (“Ten little Indian boys went out to dine; one choked his little self and then there were nine,” etc.), forming a template for the m.o. of each killing, after which another Indian figurine is removed from the centerpiece on the dining-room table. The cable car is wrecked, taking the fleeing Hoppe with it, which renders escape or rescue impossible for the moment, and forces the guests to fall back on their own devices. When a search of the house proves fruitless, the survivors are obliged to conclude that Mr. Owen is one of them, and various stratagems are attempted to identify him (or her) while the guests weigh the veracity of the accusations against them, and the possibility that ’fessing up may save their lives.

Of the likable leads, O’Brian was television’s Wyatt Earp, later starring in Richard Matheson’s Alfred Hitchcock Hour adaptation of his novel Ride the Nightmare, and the gorgeous Eaton, best known as the iconic “golden girl” from Goldfinger (1964), was reunited with Towers to play Su-Muru (like Fu Manchu a creation of Sax Rohmer). Fabian stretched himself to play a teen idol, while the exotic Daliah Lavi looms large in the BOF universe for Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963), the Matt Helm film The Silencers (1966), and the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967). Also featured were Stanley Holloway and Wilfrid Hyde-White, both of My Fair Lady (1964); the latter appeared in multiple Towers productions, as did Leo Genn and Dennis Price.

As usual, Christie’s Swiss-watch plotting is as much the star as any member of that name cast, even with the upbeat ending, and I won’t spoil the fun by either enumerating the various deaths or revealing the solution. Although it was not included in the print recently shown by TCM, the film originally included a device similar to the “Fright Break” from William Castle’s Homicidal (1961) or the “Werewolf Break” from The Beast Must Die (1974), in which the story pauses at the climax and a clock appears on the screen, ticking away to give the audience one last chance to guess the killer’s identity. But this well-produced mystery needs no such gimmick to make it work, succeeding on the merits of its premise and ensemble to offer a fine evening’s entertainment.

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Fabergé Dregs, Part II

Concluding our look at Octopussy on page and screen.

Reprinted under the title “Berlin Escape” in Argosy (June 1962), and again in Intrigue Magazine (November 1965), “The Living Daylights” was neither the last Bond adventure Fleming penned (presumably The Man with the Golden Gun), nor the last to be published (“Octopussy”). It is in fact the earliest story in the Octopussy collection, yet due to the structure of this series of posts, it was the last I re-read, and thus I was acutely aware that it would be my literary farewell to 007. I hope that, after systematically revisiting all fourteen books since I blazed through Casino Royale in its entirety on June 25, I may be permitted to wax nostalgic for a moment, especially regarding the story’s setting, where location shooting for Octopussy also took place at Checkpoint Charlie.

At the risk of sounding like a Bond villain, I miss the fictional Cold War intrigue of which Berlin in general and Checkpoint Charlie in particular were Ground Zero, immortalized in key works by my three favorite post-Fleming espionage writers. Although John le Carré had written about his “incongruous spy” George Smiley before, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold—with its heart-wrenching climax atop the Berlin Wall—put him on the map. Its success led my friend Elleston Trevor (who had read only a review, and not the book itself) to create Quiller in The Berlin (aka Quiller) Memorandum, while Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin was one of three novels filmed by Bond producer Harry Saltzman, with Michael Caine as the hitherto unnamed “Harry Palmer.”

Getting back to the subject at hand, Fleming’s premise—which, if I recall correctly, bears some similarity to the second Quiller novel, The Ninth Directive—finds 007’s colleague Number 272 about to cross the frontier, bringing his valuable secrets. Due to a security breach, the KGB has dispatched a sniper, the aptly named Trigger, to take him out, so the reluctant Bond’s mission is to shoot the shooter…but, as usual, things don’t play out that simply. Watching the arrival of a woman’s orchestra that rehearses in the building from which Trigger must fire, 007 is taken with a blonde cellist, only to see when 272 makes his break that she is the sniper; at the last moment, he chooses instead to shoot the rifle out of her hands and “scare the living daylights out of her.”

Even before Octopussy, Roger Moore had expressed his desire to depart the series, and Timothy Dalton was one of those considered to replace him, but Moore was persuaded to return when Eon Productions learned it needed maximum firepower against a resurgent Sean Connery in the same year’s rival 007 production, Never Say Never Again. Moore really did call it quits after one more entry, A View to a Kill, and Dalton—who had made his film debut in The Lion in Winter—finally got his chance. The new Bond was accompanied by a new Miss Moneypenny, as Caroline Bliss replaced Lois Maxwell, the only performer seen in all fifteen prior 007 films; Brown continued as M, and Keen made his last of six appearances as Gray, introduced in The Spy Who Loved Me.

Most of the major crew members of The Living Daylights (e.g., Glen, Maibaum, Wilson, Barry, Binder, production designer Peter Lamont) were carried over from both Octopussy and A View to a Kill, as was Llewelyn. After Duran Duran’s success with “A View to a Kill,” Barry once more teamed up with a current pop group—in this case, Norway’s a-ha—to write the title tune, and if in each instance the lyrics are at times incomprehensible in one or more senses of the word, both songs have a Bondian edge that had been lacking for years. Sadly, The Living Daylights ended Barry’s distinguished quarter-century association with 007, which had begun when he arranged and recorded Monty Norman’s “James Bond Theme” for Dr. No; he died in January 2011 at 77.

Until the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale, this was the last Bond film ostensibly based on Fleming, although Maibaum and Wilson actually retain most of the story amid the obligatory set pieces of their largely invented script. “Top KGB mastermind” General Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé), who plans to defect in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, is being watched by a KGB sniper, so he personally requests that his contact, Saunders (Thomas Wheatley)—an analog to Fleming’s Sender—summon Bond to protect him. To Saunders’s annoyance, 007 again opts for the non-lethal shot, but here his reasoning is clearer as he quickly concludes that the blonde cellist, Kara Milovy (Maryam d’Abo), was an amateur who “didn’t know one end of a rifle from the other.”

Bond safely smuggles Koskov into Austria inside a scouring plug sent through an oil pipeline, and during his debriefing, Koskov spins a story that makes M and Gray sit up and take notice. He claims that his superior, General Leonid Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies), who replaced Gogol when the latter was promoted, hates détente and has formed an assassination program targeting British and American agents. Knowing Pushkin, Bond is skeptical, but M produces a piece of evidence that reveals the significance of the pre-credit teaser: a tag bearing the program’s code name, smiert spionam (death to spies), that was found after a training exercise with the Double Os in Gibraltar, where 004 was killed by an unknown assassin, whom Bond eliminated in turn.

Bond’s name is on the death list, yet his suspicions mount after Koskov is “kidnapped” back by the KGB, and although ordered to kill Pushkin, he ingratiates himself with Koskov’s girlfriend, Kara, as a way of learning the truth, wooing her on the giant Ferris wheel immortalized in The Third Man. Sure enough, Koskov’s defection was as phony as his allegations against Pushkin, a “good” Soviet in the Gogol mode, and by asking Kara to make the scenario more plausible, the doubly treacherous Koskov was setting her up to be killed by 007. Bond sets up a smokescreen by faking Pushkin’s assassination, and learns that Koskov is involved with an arms dealer, Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), in a complex scheme involving weapons, diamonds, and raw opium.

As the son of a cellist, I am perhaps overly sensitive to the silliness of the scene in which Bond and Kara cross the Austrian border sledding over the snow in her cello case, especially when the instrument is revealed to be a Stradivarius that has now acquired a bullet hole. And in retrospect, I get a somewhat queasy feeling when the third act teams Bond with Kamran Shah (Art Malik), a leader of the mujahedin resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, many of whose members later joined al-Qaeda. But then, we were backing them at the time, and the climax in which 007 battles Koskov’s henchman Necros (Andreas Wisniewski) in—and dangling from—a planeload of opium is spectacular, after which Whitaker’s death and Koskov’s capture are rather a letdown.

Although the ticket-buying public never fully embraced the dour Dalton, who sometimes seemed to overcompensate for Moore’s flippancy, The Living Daylights showed that things were starting to move in the right direction, as demonstrated by his sophomore effort. With its stronger female characters, down-to-earth villains, and action sequences that felt fresh rather than warmed over—including an eye-popping Road Warrior-style tanker-truck climax—Licence to Kill enabled Dalton to end his stint as 007 on a high note (although he was originally contracted for a third film). It was only after years of complex corporate legal battles that Pierce Brosnan and the new creative team, formed by Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, ushered in the post-Fleming era with GoldenEye.

Addendum

Needless to say, I will keep you apprised of the forthcoming publication (ideally in 2012, which will mark 007’s fiftieth anniversary on the big screen) of my Cinema Retro article about Bond’s nemesis, SPECTRE head Ernst Stavro Blofled, which will fill in the blanks with the remainder of those Fleming books and their various adaptations not covered in these posts. Watch this space.

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Fabergé Dregs, Part I

Ian Fleming’s last James Bond book was a collection of short stories that was published in 1966, two years after his death, and has had several incarnations. Variously titled simply Octopussy or Octopussy and the Living Daylights, it originally contained the latter two stories, which appeared first in, respectively, Playboy (March and April 1966) and The London Sunday Times (February 4, 1962). Subsequent editions added “The Property of a Lady” (written for the 1963 volume of the annual Sotheby’s publication The Ivory Hammer, and reprinted in the January 1964 issue of Playboy) and “007 in New York” (first published as “Agent 007 in New York” in The New York Herald Tribune in October 1963, and reprinted in the U.S. edition of Fleming’s Thrilling Cities).

Octopussy was the second of five consecutive Bond films directed by erstwhile editor John Glen and co-written by Richard Maibaum and producer Michael G. Wilson; like For Your Eyes Only, it melded the eponymous story with another from the same book, “The Property of a Lady.” The title character in Fleming’s “Octopussy” is an actual cephalopod to which Major Dexter Smythe, an ex-Service officer living in Jamaica on Nazi gold he stole at the end of the war, hopes to feed a deadly scorpionfish in a bizarre experiment. Informing Smythe that the body of the German mountain guide he’d murdered—a friend of Bond’s—has been discovered, 007 leaves him to his presumed suicide, but Smythe, already dying from the sting of the scorpionfish, is drowned by Octopussy.

“The Property of a Lady” is the Emerald Sphere, an “object of vertu” by Carl Fabergé, allegedly inherited by Maria Freudenstein, the KGB double agent whose demise Fleming reported in The Man with the Golden Gun (wherein her name and that of Doctor No’s Honeychile Rider appear erroneously as Freudenstadt and Wilder). Maria is a cipher operator through whom the Service feeds the Soviets disinformation, and the funds realized from the sale of the sphere at Sotheby’s are to be her reward. Bond deduces that the KGB’s Resident Director in London will be there to push up the price as an underbidder, and by attending the auction, 007 is able to identify him so that, “In the grim chess game that is secret service work, the Russians would have lost a queen.”

The film opens on an inauspicious note with a typically irrelevant teaser, as Bond wreaks havoc in an unnamed Latin country, and a generic Maurice Binder title sequence. Even the cinematic purveyors of Pussy Galore were not bold enough to give Octopussy a literal title tune, so John Barry’s theme song was “All Time High,” which—as in Moonraker—paired a perfectly lovely theme that was, perhaps, a little too romantic for a spy thriller with somewhat schmaltzy lyrics, written by Tim Rice (!) and sung by Rita Coolidge. Then begins the story proper, almost wholly invented by Maibaum and Wilson with their collaborator, George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the Flashman novels and the screenwriter of all three of Richard Lester’s Musketeers movies.

The illness and death of Bernard Lee, which made Moonraker his last Bond entry (and eleventh continuous appearance since Dr. No), resulted in a bit of a flurry atop the command structure of the cinematic Secret Service. Out of respect for Lee, the role of M—said to be “on leave”—was not immediately recast in For Your Eyes Only, where his function of assigning 007’s mission is divided among three men: Q (Desmond Llewelyn); M’s boss, Minister of Defence Sir Frederick Gray (Geoffrey Keen); and his Chief of Staff, Bill Tanner (James Villiers). Bond’s best friend in the Service in the books, Tanner had been briefly portrayed, uncredited, by Michael Goodliffe in The Man with the Golden Gun, and would return in the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig movies.

Octopussy introduced Robert Brown as M, apparently retaining Gray’s presence for continuity, although the filmmakers stretched credulity by having him hanging around for Bond’s briefings in the next two films as well. This mission offers a rare, short-lived look at another member of the Double-O fraternity in the person of 009 (Andy Bradford), who dies bringing a Fabergé egg to the British Ambassador in West Berlin. This turns out to be a forgery, and because the Soviets are thought to be trying to raise funds by selling the original, Bond is assigned to join art expert Jim Fanning (Douglas Wilmer) at the auction, where he substitutes the fake while bidding up the price paid by exiled Afghan Prince Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) and Magda (Kristina Wayborn).

Following Khan home to India, Bond produces the genuine article when he out-cheats the prince in a backgammon match that rehashes Goldfinger’s golf game, right down to the henchman who crushes Khan’s crooked dice to powder in his fist. Soon Bond is a guest of Khan’s confederate, Octopussy, who heads a criminal sisterhood and is played by beautiful but under-emotive model Maud Adams, previously an ill-fated moll in Golden Gun. Instead of blaming Bond for the death of her father, Smythe (an expert on octopi who, we learn, gave her the nickname that inspired her sisterhood’s distinctive tattoos), she is grateful to 007 for allowing him an honorable alternative to prosecution, and requires only two kisses to melt into her obligatory “Oh, James” submission.

Khan and rogue Soviet General Orlov (Steven Berkoff), who has been stealing objets d’art from the Hermitage, double-cross Octopussy and plant an atomic bomb in her circus, about to perform at a U.S.A.F. base in Germany. When General Gogol (Walter Gotell) gets wind of this, Orlov—who hoped the apparent nuclear accident would lead to NATO disarmament—is shot, and after the sisterhood attacks Khan’s palace, 007 rescues the kidnapped Octopussy from his plane before it crashes. Along the way, we revisit the fauna-head camouflage (Goldfinger), assassin lurking above the bed (You Only Live Twice), car up on two wheels (Diamonds Are Forever), and nuke-disarming (The Spy Who Loved Me), and are subjected to Bond dressed as a gorilla and a clown.

Having stated earlier that Octopussy and its successor, A View to a Kill, vied with Moonraker for the admittedly subjective title of “Worst Bond Movie Ever,” I am now prepared—having studied the entire pre-Brosnan series in detail—to award that dubious distinction to Moonraker. And yet Octopussy has a lot to answer for, e.g., 007’s Indian contact, who poses as a snake charmer and identifies himself by playing “The James Bond Theme”; a double-take by a camel; and a “poison pen” gag that was acknowledged as hoary when used sixteen years earlier in Casino Royale. The usual sophomoric double entendres are matched by what Q dubs Bond’s “adolescent antics,” as he uses a mini-camera to zoom relentlessly into and out of the cleavage of one of Q’s colleagues.

To be continued.

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