Tag: Movietone News 27

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Stone Killer

Written by Kathleen Murphy February 21, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

It hardly matters what side of the moral fence Charles Bronson is on in a Michael Winner film. Whether he’s a noble savage hounded nearly to death by dregs of the American melting pot (Chato’s Land), an executive gun done in by his Mafia employers and an ambitious protégé (The Mechanic), or most recently, in The Stone Killer, a new centurion waging a crusade against urban Huns and Vandals—Winner’s undeviatingly nihilistic environment dead-ends him every time. Though Winner laces his increasingly ugly films with heavyhanded liberal preachiness, his central character rarely discovers any ethical position except the dubious one of executioner. Maybe Winner is after the notion that killer societies make murderers of us all—but I doubt it: he wallows too comfortably in his visions of the most brutal ways of dying. You need a long spoon to sup with the Devil, and The Stone Killer further substantiates one’s suspicion that Winner, on some level of consciousness, has begun to relish that which he superficially reviles.

Read More “Review: The Stone Killer”

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Scalawag

Written by Richard T. Jameson February 7, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

Kirk Douglas becomes yet another star to learn he ought to stay in front of the camera. His directorial debut lacks style, wit, pace, visual distinction, common sense—lacks even naïveté, which might have proved at least modestly winning. Indeed, the picture serves up some very ugly doses of casual death-dealing by a motley crew of constantly guffawing pirates who, with peglegged Douglas in the lead, scramble around Alta California in pursuit of treasure and G-rated good times. The suburban audience I saw Scalawag with had come mostly for the second-run cofeature, Charlotte’s Web, to judge by remarks overheard, but they responded to Douglas’s shambling efforts with that programmed laughter they learn from canned tracks on TV. As a performer, Douglas has usually fared best as some kind of scoundrel (his best performance, Lonely Are the Brave, is a conspicuous exception), especially such early triumphs as the malevolent, latently homosexual gangster in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) and the Machiavellian producer in Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), as Howard Hawks observed in connection with The Big Sky (also ’52), when he tries to sell himself as a nice guy he is less than convincing. Scalawag asks us to delight in a nice scoundrel, but director Douglas leaves actor Douglas stranded.
Read More “Review: Scalawag”

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors

Review: The Public Eye

Written by Robert C. Cumbow January 24, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

The Public Eye begins with promise but finally has little to recommend it but some nice pictures of London. It is a sappy, soppy, misguided movie unlike anything I ever expected to see released under Sir Carol Reed’s signature. The story concerns David, a dignified, intellectual British accountant, who has met Belinda, a hip American waitress of simple philistine tastes, has dazzled her with his knowledge and culture, and has wed her. As the film opens, David retains a private detective agency to follow Belinda, who has been going out by herself a great deal, much to his suspicion. Though innocent of infidelity, she quickly establishes an intimate relationship with the detective. The two never speak or touch, cementing their peekaboo “affair” by following each other through London, day in and day out. The wife’s affections are going begging, it seems, because David’s arts-and-cultural-activities lifestyle has begun to bore her. Explaining this to David in his first few scenes as the private detective Julian Christoferou, Topol is charming and winsomely comic. But soon afterward he turns marriage counselor and determines to make David “worthy” of Belinda by spouting facile speeches about “love,” “sharing,” and “fee1ings.”

Review: Happy Mother’s Day—Love, George

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 17, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

The best thing about Happy Mother’s Day—Love, George is some yeah-that‘s-the-way-it-looks nighttime photography by Walter Lassally. A minor technical footnote, to be sure, and not enough to redeem the sloppy ugliness of Darren McGavin’s directorial debut. The plot is very confused, and the leaking of that plot to the audience is even more contused and slew-footed (the absence of several performers listed in the credits—e.g., Thayer David as a minister—suggests that some desperate wholesale cutting has taken place at the last moment). Central to the enterprise is Ron Howard (American Graffiti‘s Steve) as a mysterious gangling youth who hops off a truck in a Maine coastal village early one morning and starts making several people uncomfortable just by his presence. Cloris Leachman drops her oatmeal because he looks like the illegitimate son she farmed out to a family of religious freaks years before. Bobby Darin goes on the prod because he’s been keeping company with Leachman, his employer at the dockside diner, and the encroachment of a new male threatens him. Patricia Neal, Leachman’s sister, starts snarling because (1) she snarls at everybody, (2) she snarls especially at males, and (3) her dewy-eyed daughter Tessa Dahl is given to staring out the window at the boy.

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Payday

Written by Kathleen Murphy January 16, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

Probably what the people who made Payday had in mind was an exercise in a sort of cinematic new journalism—an objective, but highly commercial, look at life as it is played out on the highways and in the hangouts of the country-western music circuit. Certainly producer Ralph J. Gleason, record company VP and Rolling Stone contributing editor, possesses the sort of credentials which would enable him to authenticate the milieu, as well as accurately assess its box-office potential in the wake of such films as Marjoe, Carry It On and Don’t Look Back—not to mention the current romantic fervor for country-western singers who have served time, been dopers, picked cotton—in short. Seen hard times. Audiences obviously get a charge out of nosing about the behind-the-scenes lives of big-name entertainers, satisfying their healthy or unhealthy curiosity about the necessarily diminished or tarnished identities of performers once they are no longer magnified by that magic circle of limelight. Then too, lurking in even the most sophisticated minds is the old cliché that these showbiz folks, for all the glory, lead really sad (or better yet, depraved) lives.

Review: I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 10, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband is a private party that never gets off the ground for the characters or the audience, although it may have been lotsa laughs for the people who made it. I haven’t read Dan Greenburg’s “sex novel” or his autobiography of sex-play, Scoring, or anything else but a couple of similarly oriented pieces (I mean…) in Playboy; but this movie has nothing new to tell anyone about why friendly couples swap or don’t swap, and there’s nothing new about the way that nothing is related to us. The main characters, with the probable exception of Andrew Duncan’s stuffy lab type, are fairly sympathetic, but the performances are klutzy in a like-us-because-we’re-klutzy way that has worn out its welcome by now, considering how many non-actors and non-directors figure they can get by on it. The situation: two couples take a vacation home for the season on Martha’s Vineyard where they encounter the new marital morality at one of a series of institutionalized parties and gingerly play at bringing the game home with them. Comfortable friendship and the sanctity of marriage prevail in the end, as far as the main characters are concerned, while the screenwriter and producers stroke each other off by taking walk-on (but much-discussed) parts as the local swingers of record. A home movie all the way.
Read More “Review: I Could Never Have Sex with Any Man Who Has So Little Regard for My Husband”

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews, Horror

Review: Mystery of the Wax Museum

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 9, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

For years recorded as lost by more than one film history, the original Mystery of the Wax Museum (remade in the Fifties as House of Wax) suddenly popped up on channel 13’s Dr. Zingrr hour with its 1933 Technicolor intact, even. Or perhaps not so intact: frequently one seemed to be watching a standard black-and-white flick on a color TV with the red turned up, and it’s difficult to say whether this reflected the natural pallor of two-color Technicolor, the fading of the dyes over the intervening decades, or bum transmission and/or reception. Whatever the precise causes of the effect, there was more of a thrill in seeing a resurrected title out of legend than there was in anything Michael Curtiz and company had wrought onscreen.

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Walking Tall

Written by Kathleen Murphy December 20, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

“[Karlson’s] special brand of lynch hysteria establishes such an outrageous moral imbalance that the most unthinkable violence releases the audience from its helpless passivity.” Andrew Sarris’s five-year-old assessment of Phil Karlson’s work up until that time anticipates exactly what makes Walking Tall so frighteningly effective and yet so morally devious. Based on the true-life experiences of a Tennessee sheriff named Buford Pusser, Karlson’s latest film is a seductive and potent fantasy of impossible good vs. heartwarmingly unambiguous evil. Pusser (Joe Don Baker), disillusioned with the organized dishonesty of the wrestling game, quits to return to the idyllically rural environs of his hometown, only to discover that the same evil has wormed its way into Eden in the guise of gambling, mobile cathouses, and poisonous moonshine. It never seems to occur to Pusser that all these criminal activities could be killed off by economic boycott, that someone is buying these soul-destroying services. Unhampered by any newfangled notions about free will, Buford Pusser turns self-styled savior and spends the rest of the film alternately harrowing and being crucified by the forces of Hell.

Review: The Mackintosh Man

Written by Robert C. Cumbow December 20, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

John Huston’s newest, a spy thriller of sorts, had a short first run downtown and has slipped almost unnoticed to the neighborhood circuit. It’s just as well. Reviewers have criticized The Mackintosh Man‘s convoluted plot, but the principal weakness is a slowness of pace which allows even the moderately intelligent viewer to stay well ahead of each complication and resolution. Every twist and surprise is so over-prepared that any possibility for suspense or shock is eliminated. A motor chase through Irish mountain roads, which could have been gripping or at least flashy, is dragged out to the point of boredom. An equally promising finale, expressing Huston’s customary ironic view of the respective moralities of good guys and bad guys, is executed with a total lack of inspiration, becoming pedestrian and predictable. An impressive cast, ranging from good to excellent, is totally wasted.

Read More “Review: The Mackintosh Man”

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Charley Varrick

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 6, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 27, November 1973]

The new Siegel is characteristically clean, fascinatingly and unfussily detailed, beautifully paced—a model of movie craftsmanship and a pointed affront to those slovenly wrecking derbies and indiscriminate bloodbaths that have been passing for contemporary action thrillers the last year or so. Indeed, to anyone who has alternately yawned and fidgeted through shapeless and soulless dreck like Badge 373 and The Stone Killer, wondering what it was doing to general audiences and—through them as an economic factor—what it was doing to the future of the genre, the first quarter-hour of Charley Varrick is deeply exhilarating: not only a superior exercise in suspenseful narration but also an up-to-the-moment demonstration that they still can make ’em the way they used to.