Bradley’s Hundred #11-20

Continuing the explication of my hundred favorite films, listed on the B100 page accessible above.

Blade Runner: As is often the case, I prefer the original version, with the narration and quasi-happy ending that bothered so many, to the subsequent director’s cut (of which I believe there are now at least two), but no matter how you slice it, this is still one of the most amazing films ever made. The titular operative (Harrison Ford) is brought reluctantly out of retirement to track down a group of deadly androids with a built-in lifespan, played by Rutger Hauer (never better as Roy Batty), Brion James, and the up-and-coming Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy. Questions of identity permeate his encounters with these Replicants, their creator (Joseph Turkel), and his niece (Sean Young). Loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, whose work was later adapted—with varying degrees of success—into Total Recall, Screamers, Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly, and Next. The real star is Ridley Scott’s evocation of overpopulated 21st-century Los Angeles; the top-notch supporting cast includes Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, and William Sanderson. “It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker.”

The Bridge on the River Kwai: 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), who wrote the novel, blacklisted screenwriters Michael Wilson and Carl Foreman received posthumous Oscars in 1984. The ending is somewhat different from Boulle’s but, not surprisingly, more cinematic. With Jack Hawkins, James Donald, André Morell, and a superb Malcolm Arnold score.

A Bridge Too Far: I’m one of the few people who really liked this adaptation of Cornelius (The Longest Day) Ryan’s bestseller. A financial failure, it dramatizes the equally ill-fated Operation Market-Garden, in which paratroops attempted to seize three bridges in occupied Holland that would have enabled the Allies to cross the Rhine into Germany; the title tells it all. The wonderful score is by John Addison, and I don’t see how you can dislike a film with Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, and Liv Ullmann. Well, okay, admittedly we have to put up with James Caan, Elliott Gould, and Ryan O’Neal (three of my least favorites), too, but still.

Carnival of Souls (1962): I was one of the first to spread the gospel about this no-budget stunner starring Candace Hilligoss (who also appeared, but whose head did NOT end up on a platter, as a friend dutifully corrected me, in Del Tenney’s Curse of the Living Corpse). Shot in Kansas, it features Hilligoss as a young woman who emerges from the river after the car in which she was a passenger plunges from a bridge, and begins to experience strange visions and other odd occurrences. Moving to a new town to take a job as a church organist, she is drawn to a dilapidated carnival fairground nearby. A unique and truly creepy film that scared the hell out of me when I was a nipper. The director, Herk Harvey (who previously made industrial films), plays “The Man.”

Casablanca: An outstanding score and cast, plus one of the most quotable scripts and unforgettable collections of minor characters ever, place this in the top echelon of the cinema. Humphrey Bogart runs Rick’s Café Americain in the titular city during the early hours of World War II, sticking his neck out for nobody (demonstrated by the fate of Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre in one of his briefest but most memorable roles) and nursing a heart broken by a love affair in soon-to-be-occupied Paris. Suddenly, up pops the breaker herself, in the heart-melting form of Ingrid Bergman, who turns out to have been married all along to the presumed-dead Resistance leader Paul Henreid. The problems of three little people add up to much more than a hill of beans in Bogart’s best-known film, featuring Claude Rains as the corrupt (but not TOO corrupt) Inspector Renault, Dooley Wilson as piano-playing Sam (who performs the unforgettable “As Time Goes By”), Conrad Veidt as nasty Nazi Major Strasser, and Sydney Greenstreet as Rick’s competing nightclub owner, Signor Ferrari.

Casino Royale (1967): It all started when producer Charles K. Feldman snapped up the rights to Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel (which, for trivia buffs, was originally dramatized for television on Climax!, with Barry Nelson horrifically miscast as an American [!] James Bond and Peter Lorre as the villain, LeChiffre). The rights to the rest were then bought by the team that has since produced the official series, which by the time this was made encompassed five films. Realizing he could not compete with Sean Connery (and who could?), Feldman decided to make this a spoof, though ironically more of the novel remains amid the gags than in some of the later “adaptations.” And what a spoof it is (albeit widely despised), combining the work of five directors, including John Huston (who plays M) and Val Guest; comic geniuses Peter Sellers (as baccarat expert Evelyn Tremble), Woody Allen (as Bond’s hapless and traitorous nephew, Jimmy), and Ronnie Corbet of Two Ronnies fame; distinguished actors such as David Niven (as Bond), Deborah Kerr, William Holden, and Charles Boyer; the formidable Orson Welles as LeChiffre; a host of references to the earlier Bond films, including a golden girl, a villain named Dr. Noah, and the stunning Ursula Andress; cameos by everyone from George Raft to Peter O’Toole and Jean Paul Belmondo; and a score that includes Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s Oscar-nominated “The Look of Love” and the title song (a Word-Man fave), played by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

Citizen Kane: Often called the greatest movie ever made; pretty damn good either way, and shows Orson Welles at his best. Given carte blanche after his many successes on stage and radio, Welles directed, co-wrote (with Herman J. Mankiewicz), and stars as Charles Foster Kane, a self-centered newspaper magnate based on William Randolph Hearst, whose efforts to sabotage the film helped prevent it from being a success at the time. Although some of the cinematic techniques used here had been pioneered by others, Welles’s mastery of the form is undeniably brilliant, and the film remains as a bittersweet reminder of what he was capable of, given the money and the opportunities.

Colossus: The Forbin Project: This was criminally mishandled by Universal, which didn’t know what to do with a film about a computer taking over the world in the wake of 2001: A Space Odyssey, although the brilliant novel by D.F. Jones predated Kubrick’s movie. Eric Braeden had appeared on The Rat Patrol as Hans Gudegast, but was forced to change his name to something a little less obviously German in order to secure the lead role of Dr. Charles Forbin, the inventor of Colossus. The idea is to take the decision to launch The Bomb out of the hands of fallible humans, and give it to a supercomputer that will make judgments coldly and rationally, based on facts rather than emotions. But no sooner is it switched on than Colossus detects a Soviet counterpart called Guardian, and together, with their metaphoric finger on the nuclear trigger, they assume control of the world. I’ve prayed for years that someone will film the remainder of Jones’s trilogy, The Fall of Colossus and Colossus and the Crab. Both Braeden and director Joseph Sargent are still alive, but screenwriter James Bridges is gone, and since this was a financial flop, I’m not holding my breath.

“Crocodile” Dundee: At once an adventure, a comedy, and a romance, this film makes effective use of Australian star Paul Hogan’s considerable charm. Hogan co-wrote the film and four years later married his bewitching co-star, Linda Kozlowski…a native, I might add, of my Mom’s hometown of Fairfield, Connecticut, to whom he remains wed even now. She’s Sue Charlton, a Newsday reporter who goes Down Under for a story on Outback phenom Mick Dundee, and when she brings him back to New York, he finds himself as much a fish out of water as Sue was on his turf. With a wonderful score by Peter Best and a supporting role for go-to Aborigine David Gulpilil of Walkabout fame. The surprisingly good “Crocodile” Dundee II reverses the formula: Mick and Sue run afoul of Colombian drug lords in New York, and return to Australia for a showdown on Mick’s terms; I anticipate finally seeing “Crocodile” Dundee in Los Angeles with some trepidation.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): One of the three seminal SF films to open the 1950s (the others being Destination Moon and The Thing), and one of several superb genre films directed by Val Lewton alumnus Robert Wise, this features a true sense of the 1950s’ Cold War paranoia. Michael Rennie has the best role of his career as Klaatu, who lands on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in his flying saucer, accompanied by a towering, death-beam-wielding cyclopean robot, Gort. Before he can deliver his vital message, Klaatu is gunned down by a trigger-happy solider; after recovering from his wounds, he escapes from Walter Reed military hospital and poses as a human to learn more about our nutty race. His encounters with widow Patricia Neal and her young son prove fateful as the truth of Klaatu’s mission and abilities becomes clearer. “Klaatu barada nikto.”