Topkapi (1964)

Now this pissed me off when I watched it.  And I feel sour about that because I love Jules Dassin and I have a high regard for Maximilan Schell but this felt like such a flimsy, glossy, insubstantial film that I just felt a bit cheated.  I know that it’s a caper and I know that not every film can be Wild Strawberries and I know that it’s a bit tittish to bemoan a film for being ‘just entertainment’, but I just went in with higher expectations of the people involved.  I’m sorry, that’s the price of being so talented Jules.

I mean it’s not a bad film.  It’s entertaining, neatly plotted, looks great, is nicely paced with just enough humour to lighten the tone without turning a drama into a comedy.  Peter Ustinov has a ball as small-time crook Arthur Simpson, Maximilian Schell and the always entertaining Robert Morley are fine too and Akim Tarimoff is simply barmy as the haughty drunken cook.  In fact, I don’t know why I’m so down on it.  I think I just wanted it to be Rififi and it’s more like The Italian Job and if I can love that for being what it is, why can’t I love this?  There is, now I look back, a lot to admire here- not least in the sheer inventiveness of the heist.  And I’m beginning to think that I misjudged this badly when I was watching it.  The visual humour, tension, gadgets, dramatic scenery, outlandish characters and general tone of the film is something commonplace now, but I can’t think of many films of that type which precede it.  Even the matching suits which Ustinov, Schell and Gilles Ségal wear for the heist have become a recurring motif in movies like of Oceans 11 since.  I’m talking myself around here. 

Perhaps I should give it another try?

I was going to give this a three, but I’ve talked myself into marking it as 5/10 and one that needs re-watching soon.

À Bout de Souffle (1960)

The intention I have behind these notes is to remind myself what I loved and hated and didn’t understand and wanted to remember about these films.  As such, this note is superfluous- I love this film and know it frame by frame.  Funny how a film that has been imitated to death and is almost fifty years old can still seem fresh and invigorating.  Unlike most of the films I watch, I’ve read a bit about this one.  I know, for example, that the spliced sequences on the Champs, in the taxi, in the bedroom, on the ride into Paris were a financially-motivated innovation.  I know that the sirens which drown out dialogue were retained to avoid wasting film.  It doesn’t matter, though, they work as representations of reality and as artistic statements.  The whole thing works. 

Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo)’s opening line “After all, I’m an arsehole” sets the tone beautifully.  From there he embarks on a crime-spree that is motivated neither by malice nor desperation, but because it is his default setting.  He is immune to remorse.  From car theft to extortion to mugging to the murder of a policeman he doesn’t hesitate and doesn’t bat an eyelid.  He is amoral and thoroughly ambivalent to society moving instinctively according to his code “informers inform, burglars burgle, murders murder, lovers love”.  Indeed he even considers the love he has for Jean Seberg’s Patricia to be something to regret.  He is just a mixed-up kid, aping Bogart and playing at life.  To Michel we are what we are by nature and we simply have to follow our course without deviation, to him it is that simple.  He speaks of his love for and disdain for France and the French and Americans and other things, but the words ring hollow.  Belmondo speaks these sentences whilst emoting others (he really gets behind “never use the brakes.  As old man Bugatti used to say ‘I build cars to run not to stop” and you can see that ‘run not stop’ ethos lives within him throughout the film).  When Godard positions him in front of a poster that shouts ‘live dangerously until the end’, Michel’s raison d’être is encapsulated in a moment.

Building the film around a character as reprehensible as Michel Poiccard (strip away Belmondo’s charm and what’s left isn’t pretty) would have made for a very difficult and perhaps shallow viewing experience- indeed the storyline can probably be comprehensively summarised in a sentence.  This is why Patricia is so important.  She too is a mixed-up kid, she too has a kind of dubious morality and she too offers platitudes and opinions without conviction, but she is redeemable and fundamentally good whereas Michel is fundamentally rotten.  Her emotional wrangling (“I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m free or free because I am unhappy”) is an important counterpoint to Michel’s animal instinctiveness.  Her role is also important as it permits Godard to question such things as the female role (French feminism at this time was a vital political force), infatuation, mortality, love and sensuality and- perhaps most importantly- predestination and happiness.  On a philosphical basis, there is a tremendous amount in À Bout de Souffle to consider.

The thing which I love about À Bout de Souffle probably more than any other film, though, is its cool.  I know that it’s childish to label something cool or even to love something because you think it’s cool but I don’t care- maybe I’m just a mixed-up kid too!  The look of the film whether by pragmatic inspiration or design is, there’s no other word for it, breathtaking.  Jim Jarmusch- who I love dearly- built a career on this stuff.  The whole film is shot on a hand-held and allows Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard (the only men involved in shooting the film) to focus in on faces and follow them around- there is a marvellous scene in the Travel Agents as they firstly follow Michel as he approached the desk, then Michel and Tolmatchoff (Richard Balducci), then Michel again and as he leaves we follow the arriving Detectives as they repeat his journey just a step behind him.  The film also utilises high-angle shots from rooftops and balconies showing Michel and Patricia in the context of the busy city.  Their story is at once immediate and yet one of many thousands of stories.  Another aspect of the spliced scenes is the insistent urgency that they give the story, along with the great jazzy soundtrack- and in particular the piano/trumpet refrain- by Martial Solal, a real zest and vigour.

I honestly can’t speak highly of this film, I love it in more ways than my paltry descriptive powers will allow me to express.  It means the world to me.  10/10.

The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

This arrival of The Girl on a Motorcycle from LoveFilm couldn’t have been neater.  Consider that it is directed by Jack Cardiff, the genius cinematographer from Black Narcissus, who I have discussed in some depth recently, featuring Marianne Faithful (I’ve already discussed Anita Pallenberg the other infamous Stone-ette this week) and Nouvelle Vague icon Alain Delon ahead of my planned weekend of film Francophilia.  How neat a bundle of coincidences could I want?

Jack Cardiff directs Alain Delon

Against that backdrop, though, the film could surely only disappoint.  And it sadly does.

Often I will reflect that the more innovative and distinctive a film is, the more likely it is to be referenced, to influence and to be stolen from. And by that process the elements which inspire admiration- perhaps even adoration- come to seem mundane and commonplace. For the film fan trawling through the past, it is hard to fully appreciate the context in which a film was first seen.  Coming just twenty years after the end of the second World War this film features Marianne Faithful passing a soldiers’ graveyard and questioning the validity of the war and the sacrifices made- was this shocking iconoclasm or were many contemporaneous films exploring the same rueful territory?

I mention this because this film features extensive use of acid-coloured solarization, so much so that Jack Cardiff begins to irritate as if he were a child with a toy drumkit.  Of course, the process also allows him to get away with longer and more graphic sequences of Faithful and Delon romping than would probably have been allowed otherwise.  But I couldn’t help thinking to myself “what’s the point of going to all that trouble to show something that the viewer can’t recognise anyway?”.  Whether these ‘groovy’ scenes achieved their aim in the 60s or not, I can’t confirm- but they date the movie badly now and look clumsy and ineffective now.

And The Girl on a Motorcycle is really summed up by that.  It is a film of worthy- though frankly ill-judged- intentions, attempting to record on film the thought and ambitions and streams of consciousness of a girl riding across continental Europe.  Like a rites of passage road movie with one protagonist.  Judged against such ambitious aims, it fails mightily.  In fact, it is of no more merit than any number of cheap 60s exploitation B-movies.  The plotline- the bit that isn’t summed up by the title anyway- is told largely in flashback.  Marianne Faithful’s character Rebecca leaves her staid husband of a couple of weeks, the failing teacher Raymond (Roger Mutton- terrible actor but the wearer of a great quiff!) for Alain Delon’s character Daniel, who she met and commenced an affair with in the run-up to the Wedding.  Daniel is the only character in the piece of any substance whatsoever- maybe because Delon and Powell and Pressburger stalwart Marius Goring in a very minor role are the only actors of any merit on show.  He is callous, manipulative and egotistical; though we discover that this bravado masks the deep pain of heartbreak.

The dialogue- which is mainly concerned with expressing Rebecca’s inner thoughts and feelings- is stilted, obvious and typically vacuous Haight-Ashbury hippy nonsense- “not everyone who is dead has been buried”; “sometimes it’s an instinct to fly. I’m not going to feel guilty”; “Rebellion’s the only thing that keeps you alive”- that kind of bollocks.  And only Delon’s character- somewhat implausibly a university lecturer- has any lines which steer clear of cliché – during a seminar on, believe it or not, the morality of free love he opines “love without love, desire without love…so what is love? … A blanket to cover all the dark emotions- desire, lust, a need to hurt, to be hurt”.  This isn’t to say he escapes the scriptwriter’s clunking prose throughout- his “Your body is like a violin in a velvet case” may well worst first line for any movie character ever.

It is all so disappointing given the calibre of the people involved.  There are blatant continuity errors, logical gaps (Daniel must be supernatural as he appears in a locked room at one point without any explanation how), wooden performances and lowest-common-denominator innuendo with the motorbike as a big cock.  The Girl on a Motorcycle features a girl on a motorcycle on a low-loader- did no-one think that the lean and steering involved in cornering would make Faithful sat bolt upright as the bike takes a hairpin look pretty bloody stupid?  Oh I despair!  A French film by an English Director shot in Switzerland with the Frenchman Alain Delon as a German and the English Marianne Faithfull as a Swiss.  This is all too much to bear.

I’m not generally in favour of remakes (not least because they keep that goofy slapheaded tit Nic Cage in work) but there is the kernel of a good idea in here being woefully badly executed.  This could have been an exploration of freedom, of the feminist movement, of the futility of free love, of the futility of marriage, of existentialism, of expressionism, of any message the film-maker wants to say.  The premise is a blank canvas.  It could have been an artistic exploration; it could have been a beautifully simple road movie; it could have been any number of worthy and interesting things.  But what it is, I’m afraid, is a fucking mess.  If any film ever required a remake, this is it.

Devoid of subtlety, intrigue, wit or beauty, this is a very poor exploitation film.  The only bit I liked at all was the sequence where Faithfull composed her farewell letters in a café, whilst Jack Cardiff filled the screen with faces of old men. It said nothing of interest, I just thought it looked nice.  Oh, and I also liked the following exchange: “Love is a feeling” “so is toothache”. 2/10

One Million Years B.C. (1966)

Somewhere in Spain in 1966 Sergio Leone was creating a true cinematic masterpiece in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  At the same time and in the same country, Raquel Welch was running around in a furry bikini watching John Richardson fight off a giant turtle, a giant tarantula and a giant iguana.  Today, I watched Raquel instead.

This is a daft prehistoric adventure that ditches all references to anything historically possible and casts John and Raquel as representatives of the brunette and blonde tribes who meet and find love bringing their peoples together before the entire thing is abruptly halted by a volcanic eruption.  Redheads of the world, it’s these two you have to blame!

The real star of the film, though, is Ray Harryhausen- the master of visual effects.  This is a crappy, low-budget Hammer flick that you go to see either to ogle Raquel Welch in the near nude (and why not?) or to admire Harryhausen’s stop-motion plasticine wizardry.  For me it gets 3/10- all three for the genius Harryhausen.  The rest is tat.

Carry on Up The Khyber (1968)

When I was bigging up ‘Carry On Camping‘ recently I said “it is neither the best scripted nor the most inventive of the Carry On series”.  This one might be.  The regulars are given characters which suit them beautifully and the occasional players integrate beautifully- especially Roy Castle (or Roy Fucking Castle as I will always remember him since hearing it on ‘Bottom‘ when I was far more impressionable than I am now) who is a straight-laced foil for the others to bounce off.

The plot, which acts as little more than a device to move from one gag to another, concerns the 3rd Foot in Mouth  regiment in India and their reputation as ‘devils in skirts’- which is debunked when Bernard Bresslaw as Bungdit Din, leader of the Burpahs, steals the woollen underwear that Charles Hawtry wore beneath his kilt.  This causes a battle at the Khyber Pass (a mountain path in Wales in reality) leading the Burpahs to attack the Ambassadorial residence of Lord Sidney Ruff-Diamond, causing the famous closing battle scene.  The puns are delicious and delivered with camp perfection:  When the Fakir fails to entertain Kenneth Williams (the Khasi of Kalabar Rhandi Lal) he commands “Bring on the dancing girls. Get rid of this idiot!” leading to Bernard Bresslaw instructing “Fakir! Off!”; When Roy Castle instructs his men “Fire at will!” Peter Butterworth counters “Poor old Will, why do they always fire at him” and so on.

It’s obvious, cheaply made, unsubtle, childish and camper than a row of tents, but it entertains me immensely. 8/10.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

What I love about exploitation movies is their sheer economy.  Low budget film-making requires innovation and a clear idea of what film you’re making and for who.  Russ Meyer made ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ for boys who want to see action, sex and fast cars- now I’m not strictly part of that demographic, but this movie is so effective in what it does, that even I was hooked.

The ruthless way in which the film shows exactly what is required to pack a punch and no more, it is visceral and energetic.  There are goofs all over the place- licence plates fall off and appear back in place and the state of the actresses clothes varies wildly- and some of the performances are really ropey, but the film also has real strengths.  Tura Satana’s pneumatically chested sociopath is truly iconic, Stuart Lancaster as the old man is lascivious and irredeemable and Lori Williams as Billie- while being by no means consistent- shows moments of real promise.  More importantly Meyer’s slick editing and Jack Moran’s high-camp dialogue are memorable indeed.  So, great title, great script, great direction and a great title song.  Superb.

I often remark that a film can only be judged by how well a film achieves its own aims, on that basis it gets a full 10/10.  I don’t like this being ranked above something like ‘Aguirre’, though, so I’ll bend my own rules- 9/10.

Our Man Flint (1966)

I love Bond and I do take Bond far more seriously than it deserves.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the genre being spoofed- if it is done well.  The original Casino Royale (Niven, Sellers, Allen, Welles, Belmondo et al) was a huge disappointment given the talent involved, but this- from the year before- is far more impressive.

Following 1965’s Thunderball, this clever spoof doesn’t stretch the joke too far.  Super-suave spy Derek Flint (James Coburn) is assigned the task of stopping a shadowy group who are holding the world to ransom from their secret hideaway inside a volcano- by the way, the inside of the volcano may as well have been the inside of a shed in comparison to Ken Adam’s Thunderball set.  There is none of the clumsiness of Austin Powers or the Get Smart series, Flint is an extension of the Bond persona and his sole gadget- a lighter with 82 functions (83 if you include lighting a cigar)- is far less outlandish than the Bond gadgets that were to follow.

This is fun and disposable- Lee J. Cobb was wheeled in front of the camera and given lines to yell as a senior US Official and Devon Miles from Knight Rider appears as a nutty villain.  It’s well worth enjoying and better than all but a couple of Roger Moore’s Bond films 6/10.

Nevada Smith (1966)

My choice of film is usually fairly arbitrary and often depends upon what TCM or Film Four have scheduled or which of my high-priority LoveFilm selections arrives next.  In choosing Nevada Smith, though, I was swayed by one factor alone: Steve McQueen’s name is currently much smaller than Michael Caine’s on the tag cloud at the bottom right of my page and it just feels wrong.

I didn’t approach Nevada Smith much in the way of expectation.  It hasn’t amassed much of a reputation over the years, I don’t know much of the director Henry Hathaway’s work- aside from True Grit- and I really don’t like the work of Harold Robbins on whose novel this is based.  All this film really had going for it was its cast.  And the fact that it might help me tidy up my tag cloud.

It’s better than I expected, but not by much.  The storyline follows a familiar pattern- Steve McQueen stars as a half-Caucasian/half-native American teenager (despite McQueen being a blond 36 year old at the time) who sees his parents killed in cold blood by three men and vows to track them down and avenge the deaths.  The movie is episodic: he kills the first man (Martin Landau) in a knife fight, learns that the second (Arthur Kennedy) is in a Louisiana prison and gets sentenced himself just to kill him and then escape, and finally he hunts down the ever-reliable Karl Malden for the film’s climactic scene.

Along the way he is taught how to fight and shoot and drink and play cards by a gun salesman he tries and fails to hold up (played by an impressive Brian Keith) and he encounters a couple of love interests and a priest (played by an unconvincing Raf Vallone, he was much better as the lead Mafioso in The Italian Job) and with each of them he uses them and then turns his back on them with no further thought for them.  That is the interesting part of the film and is explored as fully as the genre allowed at that point.  Meanwhile Sergio Leone was breaking down such considerations with the contemporaneous masterpiece ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ and in that context Nevada Smith is exposed as a formulaic genre picture.

It is just a standard western if, I suppose, a little more ambitious than most.  And content to exist within the confines of genre expectations when the opportunity to examine the emptiness of revenge or the brutalisation of man as a means to overcome brutality was there.  And for that wasted opportunity, 5/10.

Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)

All that I know about Rasputin (the historical figure) has be gleaned from the title of this Hammer movie and the bit I can remember from Boney M’s disco hit “Rah-Rah-Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine”.  So I’m in no position to verify the historical accuracy of the movie.  And I don’t care either way.  I don’t look to Hammer for historical facts, I look to them for entertainment.  And this is entertaining.  Entertaining crap.

Christopher Lee has a ball in the title role as a grubby, bearded, lecherous, womanising, brawling drunkard.  Rasputin is everything that Dracula is not and Lee makes the most of the opportunity to cut loose .  Aside from him, there is little to commend the movie- horror veteran Barbara Shelley does makes a great victim and the plot, such as it is, is entertaining enough.  But you know that it’s all guff.

Christopher Lee has a body-double for a dancing scene who is about half his size.  In one scene there is a man in the background in contemporary clothes.  In a pub full of bearded men- even Mr Barraclough from Porridge has a beard- one bloke stands around in a sixties side parting with neat sideburns.  Not to worry, Rasputin chops his rubber hand off.  He gets his in the end though when he is thrown out of the window and falls like the Clousea dummy that Dreyfuss beats up in his psychiatrist’s office.

Anyway, this is a hammy Hammer.  Completely OTT, entertaining throwaway nonsense.  4/10 including a bonus mark for Lee’s obvious relish for his character.

One thing I really giggled over was the fact that Richard Pasco as Boris looked similar to Vladimir Putin.  I wonder if Putin and Rasputin are related…

Judgement at Nuremburg (1961)

There are some films where the worthy subject-matter allows me to ignore the poorer aspects of what I’m seeing.  It’s the opposite of admiring a Leni Riefenstahl film I suppose (I’ve deliberately never seen one for that very reason).

There are faults in this film.  Some of the performances are a bit stagey, the film’s pacing is uneven and the messages are rammed home with little subtlety and are overly preachy.  But the film is important and dramatic and features some magnificent performances (most importantly from Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy and Maximilian Schell but also- a pleasant surprise for me this- a subtler-than-usual Burt Lancaster).

For telling a complex, important and challenging story with clarity and impact- 7/10.