Tag: Frank Stanley

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Magnum Force

Written by Richard T. Jameson October 3, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 29, January-February 1974]

Don Siegel he’s not, but in this sequel to Dirty Harry Ted Post has directed his first middlin’-good feature film. A Gunsmoke–Have Gun, Will Travel regular in the half-hour heyday of those series, Post has done less-than-promising work for the big screen: Hang ‘Em High, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, The Harrad Experiment. Someone—not necessarily Post—has been attentive to those critics of Harry who cried “Fascism!” and has programmatically set out to do a film with Clint Eastwood/Harry Callahan against some avowed fascists—or perhaps we must say superfascists since Harry himself still casually avows “There’s nothing wrong with shooting—just so the right people get shot.” And indeed, Eastwood’s own integrity as an actor and as a mythic figure remains untarnished: Magnum Force is the first non-Leone, non-Siegel, non-Eastwood picture in which he manifests some real style instead of sleepwalking into place to pose for the one-sheets.

Review: Breezy

Written by Richard T. Jameson November 30, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 35, September 1974]

Breezy confirms the fitful but definite promise of Play Misty for Me and High Plains Drifter: Clint Eastwood can direct. Not brilliantly—at this point, anyway—but intelligently, and with conviction to spare. Conviction has a lot to do with the success of his third film, a movie one has only to synopsize in order to appreciate its bountiful capacity for ending up something dreadful: footloose hippie with big dark eyes, a funky hat, and a guitar keeps getting entangled with middleaged, joyless-playboy divorcé in real estate; she decides she loves him, he decides he “can’t cope” with loving her, they part, and an endearingly disproportionate dog reunites them. You can cut yourself off a generous portion of skepticism and still be won over by the cliché-trampling sincerity of Kay Lenz and William Holden in the respective roles. Eastwood himself stays offscreen this time (save for a brief atmosphere bit in longshot) and perhaps that helped his directorial concentration. Yet in another sense one almost feels his presence in the unforced sympathy he brings to both the young representatives of the counterculture (Breezy’s nicely characterized pals as well as the girl herself) and the well-preserved, semi-sporty, but distinctly middleaged lovers and other strangers Holden shares his California lifestyle with (Eastwood, almost incredibly, is pushing 50). It was by no means a given that Holden’s silvering hair and creased face should play off so movingly against Kai Lenz’s breathtakingly tawny-sleek flesh and clear eyes; shot after shot unobtrusively defines their awakening to a kind of mutual knowledge beyond facile paraphrase, and when Holden turns to Lenz in the night after recounting the failure of his marriage and fairly gasps, “You’re so incredibly new!”—well, it’s a considerably more awesome moment than anyone would have expected from a one-time cattle drover on Friday night CBS.

Review: The Eiger Sanction

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 5, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 42, July 1975]

Clint Eastwood does his own mountain-climbing rightly enough, as a camera swooping out from closeup to acrophobic helicopter longshot verifies time and again. One tight-lipped smile of appreciation for that, and little remains to be said in favor of Eastwood’s fourth directorial outing. From the behind-the-credits sequence of an unidentifiable supporting player ambling through some locations-for-locations’-sake European streets, The Eiger Sanction lacks shape, rhythm, and any notable tone or point-of-view. Its grotesques—Thayer David as a 100-percent albino named Dragon who directs an international Murder Inc. from a secret red-lit room, George Kennedy as a hot-damn-buddy Western type, and Jack Cassidy as a patently treacherous faggot—are (un)directed so broadly, yet without a true sense of outrageousness, that one is inclined to feel sympathy for the performers (though only Kennedy seems to deserve any). More ordinary sorts are blatantly set up over and over to be knocked down by an incredibly predictable putdown script (Gregory Walcott, as a Dragon man who keeps rubbing Eastwood the wrong way, is such a clod that the only thing conceivably dangerous about the character is his incompetence as a tough guy). After sharing with us his own amusement at being proffered as a professor of art history who has retired from the killing game in order to enjoy the stash of masterworks bought with his ill-gotten gains, Eastwood walks uninterestingly through the rest of his part, counting on the uninflected slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am machismo that didn’t see him through High Plains Drifter either; on the evidence of his second and fourth films (he didn’t take a role in Breezy and I’d appreciate a chance to reconsider Play Misty for Me), he should leave the direction of himself to other people. The story involves the Eastwood character in one of those murky internecine projects wherein, by the time the action has run its course, we’ve had it demonstrated ad nauseam that the potentiality for betrayal is inherent in any relationship a truism that has been worked out more scrupulously in other thrillers where the conclusion didn’t seem so foregone.
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