Tag: Movietone News 60-61

Directors, Film Reviews, Sam Fuller, Sam Peckinpah

Sam Peckinpah by Sam Fuller

Written by guest May 2, 2010June 15, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

When he was in Koln, Germany scouting locations for his 1972 film Dead Pigeon on Beethovenstrasse, lifelong newsman Samuel Fuller was invited by a local journal to review any recent picture that had caught his fancy. We are delighted to reprint the result of that invitation here, with the auteur’s permission.

“Water is where you find it, and you won’t find it there! “

With that simple springboard, Sam Peckinpah’s superb film of man versus men (in this case the contradictory strands of weakness and determination within Cable Hogue) is a must-see movie from WB now playing at the EI Dorado, a new moviehouse in Koln named after Howard Hawks’ sagebrush success. Unlike the lusty Hawks film or any other Western, Peckinpah’s Ballad of Cable Hogue is a sensitive, emotional, surgical job on an American desert hermit without familiar sagebrush stuffing. At times Cable Hogue’s story gnaws at one’s memory from Von Stroheim’s Greed to Huston’s Treasure of Sierra Madre—but the gnawing is short-lived because of Peckinpah’s reconstruction of the West with fiendish authenticity.

Cable Hogue is a classic because in his passion for the counter-make-believe West, its humans and inhumans, Peckinpah never varies from his obsessive desire to show you how it really was and yet never lose that cinematic touch that makes a movie a really entertaining movie. The animal behavior of Cable Hogue, brought to primate heights by Jason Robards, is quiet claw and unbared teeth—a difficult role sensitively conquered by one of the finest actors around these days.

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by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Directors, Interviews, Sam Peckinpah, Westerns

“A privilege to work in films”: Sam Peckinpah among friends

Written by Richard T. Jameson April 23, 2010June 15, 2020

Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

Sam Peckinpah visited Seattle for several days in July, 1978, under the joint auspices of the Seattle Film Society and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On the evening of July 19 he appeared at the Seattle Concert Theatre to talk with an audience that had just seen, and warmly responded to, his comedy-western The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The following is a slightly edited transcript (from a tape made by Ray Pierre) of that dialogue. For fluency of reading we have kept the [Laughter] notations to a minimum, but the fact is that laughter punctuated the discussion with considerable frequency. -Ed.

[Questions, in italics, were mostly from members of the audience. Richard T. Jameson was moderator.]

Cable Hogue, even though Cable died at the end, was a very upbeat film, which is different from all the other [Peckinpah] films that I’ve seen. Was there a reason that in 1970 or ’69 you made a movie that does not—to me, at any rate—fit very easily with all the rest of your work?

I think it fits very well. I should mention one thing that seems to confuse people: I’ve made three, or maybe I could say four, films that were my own projects; the rest I have done because that was the job that was offered. I don’t really pick and choose. On Cable, Warren [Oates] had given me the property to read, I liked it, I bought it on time, I tried to get together with Van Heflin to make for around $700,000, could not do it. And Ken Hyman was the president of Warner Brothers at that time, loved The Wild Bunch, and I conned him into tying Cable Hogue into it because I wanted to make the film. And that’s it.

I have a question about The Wild Bunch. The first print that was shown in Seattle lasted about seven days. Then it was changed, another print was substituted. Some things were cut, deleted, mainly to conform with some criticisms that Time had about the movie. Who was responsible for the cuts?

Well, Time magazine was not responsible. It was … I was cutting Cable at the time. I got a call from [producer Phil] Feldman; he said they wanted to try it out in one theater—a shorter version. I said “Fine—in one theater.” Next thing I knew, it had been cut to pieces all over the country. So you can thank Mr. Feldman for doing it. And a man named Weintraub, who also was very active at Warner Brothers at the time.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Who’ll Stop the Rain?

Written by Robert C. Cumbow April 22, 2010June 27, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

“I’ve been waiting all my life to fuck up like this.” That’s the closest we ever get to the motivation of Vietnam War correspondent John (Michael Moriarty), who suddenly, unaccountably decides to buy two kilos of uncut heroin to smuggle from Saigon back to California, there to sell it at enormous profit. By the time his wife Marge (Tuesday Weld) and his old Marine Corps buddy Ray (Nick Nolte, who with a performance like this under his belt is to be completely and unconditionally forgiven for The Deep) are menaced very nearly to death by the mob (or are they the cops? or are they the mob after all?), it’s too late for John to change what he has got them all into. “I can’t believe I’ve done this,” he tells his bookseller father-in-law (a feisty David Opatoshu), who jejunely replies, “A sense of unreality is no defense.”

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews, Musicals

Out of the Past: The Harder They Come

Written by Robert C. Cumbow April 19, 2010

[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

Perry Henzellâ€™s Jamaican film The Harder They Come invites comparison with Marcel Camusâ€™s Black Orpheus in its stylistic reliance upon pulsating rhythms to carry it along with a sense of inevitability, and in its literary use of the music and lifestyle of New World blacks as the milieu for a story of mythic heroism. But The Harder They Come, though never as self-consciously poetic as the Camus film, is much more fatalisticâ€”as close to naturalism as such a stylized film can come. Black Orpheus increasingly restricts its meaning to the restaged Attic resurrection myth, while The Harder They Come consistently delimits its range of meaning to become not just a rehearsal of a mythic pattern but also a story of music, of crime and pursuit, of the uses and abuses of religion, and most importantly, of political impact. This may sound like a grab-bag of stylistic and thematic implication; but The Harder They Come is no pasticheâ€”itâ€™s a true Third World film in which every element relates to its central concern for the futile struggle of a people doomed to exploitation, whether in politics, crime, or business.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Days of Heaven

Written by Robert C. Cumbow April 12, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven seems made for Dolby stereo, in the way that certain films were made for Cinerama and not just in Cinerama. I was immediately struck by the film’s showy, deliberately unrealistic use of sound: left and right speakers cutting in and out, sound associated with an onscreen image coming noticeably from an offscreen location, bigger-than-life sound disembodied from its source in the frame. Indeed, Malick and Nestor Almendros have so tightly composed the frames of Days of Heaven that this use of sound is the only clue that a world exists beyond the frame; and that suits the purposes of this big, stark movie, separating its private worlds from the larger world in which its characters dwell. The crisp, sharp photography, and Jack Fisk’s meticulous art direction, offer us a very tidy world, with the same keen-edged precision seen in the worlds of, for example, Jan Troell’s The Emigrants, Werner Herzog’s Herz aus Glas, or Alan Rudolph’s Welcome to L.A. Undiffused light seems not merely to illuminate the images but actually to define them. And the result is a world so precise as to seem frozen, as if in an album, or in a memoryâ€”which is, of course, what Days of Heaven is, and why its tidiness bespeaks a deceptive simplicity. The frame is filled with what the girl-narrator remembers, not with realistic re-creations of an era. No one actually seems to live and work in the rooms and fields of Days of Heaven; rather, people and the environment seem to coexist as elements of a studied harmonic compositionâ€”a composition we must see as the apprehension and re-ordering of reality by the girl’s remembering mind. The fact that the film depicts many scenes that the girl could not have witnessed only further justifies the stylized simplicity with which Malick portrays events that are necessarily more of the imagination than of history.

Review: The End / Hooper

Written by Robert C. Cumbow April 11, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

From the tone of the “Emergence of Burt Reynolds” ballyhoo that heralded its arrival, I expected The End to be the bigger hit of the past summer’s two Reynolds films. But despite his competent bid for respect as a serious directorial talent in The End, Reynoldsâ€”on either side of the cameraâ€”is more engaging in the midst of the humble good-timeyness of Hooper. Hal Needham directed the latter, a stuntman’s paean to stuntmen; but one glance at the credit and cast lists for the two films makes a case for regarding both as the product of the Burt Reynolds stock company that has been slowly a-building through White Lightning, Gator and Smokey and the Bandit. These folks enjoy one another so darn much it’s pretty hard for us not to enjoy them, too.

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by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Lord of the Rings (Part One)

Written by Robert C. Cumbow April 9, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

Looking at the photograph of Saul Zaentz and Ralph Bakshi in the October issue of Millimeter, I am struck by how much these men, after more than two years’ involvement with The Lord of the Rings, look like two hobbits themselves. It works: Bakshi’s Frodo to Zaentz’s Bilbo … but this Ring they’ve got hold of may prove just as ambiguous in its anticipated effects as the one in this two-hour first-of-two animated films, or the one in Tolkien’s celebrated fantasy series. Although Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings has a presold audience, it is an audience that will be hard to please. One thing that is almost sure to disappoint both the skeptic and the rabid fan of the film is the indefinite feeling that accompanies the end of this first part, and the knowledge that one must wait another year or two to make up one’s mind fully. Unlike Lester’s The Three Musketeers, Bakshi’s Part One is not of a piece, but ends on a deliberately to-be-continued note which makes one wish he had opted for either a four-hour feature with intermission or a two-night, two-feature extravaganza all at once, if only to achieve the kind of unity that both cinema and myth demand.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews, Science Fiction

Review: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Written by Richard T. Jameson April 4, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

Let’s get the suspense out of the way first. I’ve been taken over: I came to the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a purist’s proper disdain for anyone who presumes to redo a classic movie, but as I sat brooding in the darkness, Phil Kaufman’s 1978 version put out its tendrils and pretty soon everything seemed just fine and why should I go around getting upset over little things? Not that the new Invasion is going to displace the old for me. No way. I think the Don Siegel version is the better movieâ€”more seamlessly, “artlessly” accomplished than the present model, and the more inspired work. But after a tacky special-effects opening (where Siegel needed nothing but a subjective descent through roiling clouds), Kaufman’s version persuasively asserts its right to life as an imaginative reflection of our time, just as Siegel’s insidious “sleeper” stands as a quintessential Fifties experience. The makers of the ’56 film were reeling under the twin impacts of Dwight Eisenhower and Joe McCarthy. Their movie played on both the cozy lure of middle-class conformity and the nagging suspicion that that bastard in the next yard or at the next desk or in the next writing cubicle at the studioâ€”indeed, all those bastardsâ€”had in mind to do you dirt in a manner you hadn’t quite figured out yet. Jack Finney’s story about pod-grown organisms usurping the identities of everyone in a small California town and reducing them to all-alike, emotionless neuters yielded a powerful metaphor for a more mundane loss of humanity. Cold War buffs were perfectly free to read in a paranoid allegory of Communist takeover: they were said to be everywhere, and wouldn’t they look like any normal, healthy, right-thinking Amurkan, same as you or me, and I’m not so sure about you…?

Film Reviews

Review: Death on the Nile

Written by Pierre Greenfield April 1, 2010June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

If your friendly neighbourhood TV station or film society is tonight showing an uncut print of Clair’s And Then There Were None or Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, you need not miss such delights in favour of Death on the Nile. But if not, you could do worse than attend. Made by the same producers as Sidney Lumet’s 1974 Murder on the Orient Express, it has, however, a different screenwriter, a different director and a different Hercule Poirot; and the difference shows. Although Jack Cardiff – who seems finally to have realized that it’s better to be a good cameraman than a bad director – gives us plenty of tourist-spot imagery up and down the banks of the Nile, with romance at the Sphinx, romantic torment at Abu Simbel and derring-do elsewhere, the film as a whole doesn’t slam gloss into the viewer’s eye the way Orient Express did, and if the starpower on display is of a marginally lower voltage than previously, the leading lights certainly give off enough energy to keep us all bright. Above all, Peter Ustinov as Hercule P. floats along in the Agatha Christie mystery soup quite serenely, whereas Albert Finney, padded and beeswaxed to the nines, felt obliged to attack the material with a funambulistic gusto.

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Film Reviews

Review: American Hot Wax / FM

Written by Richard T. Jameson March 31, 2010June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]

For a while there it seemed as if the post-mortems on the summer’s rock-oriented pictures like American Hot Wax and FM were being written before the films’ release, let alone box-office decease. But even if the backers will get to file their tax writeoffs, it’s almost certain that many more patrons got to see these films as second features to Saturday Night Fever and Grease as the big winners moved out to the nabes. Co-features don’t earn their parent companies more than token rentals that way; but if they didn’t make money, at least one of these pictures went on to make a few friends.

American Hot Wax celebrates the last few days of Brooklyn disc jockey Alan Freed’s reign as the king of rock’n’roll and the onset of his martyrdom as r&r’s patron saint. It boasts a solid stellar performance by Tim McIntire (previously seen as the least lovable of Robert Aldrich’s Choirboys), and if he doesn’t manage to save the film, he gives it a much-needed center of gravity. More than that, he strikes such a satisfying behavioral tone that, like the platter-playing paterfamilias himself, he tends to validate the enthusiasm for the music he sponsors and win our indulgence of his co-players’ excesses and director Floyd Mutrux’s miscalculations. William A. Fraker contributes his usual admirably controlled cameraworkâ€”a nice blend of impressionism and ersatz naturalism that evokes Freed’s not-at-all-glamorous milieu with quiet persuasivenessâ€”but too many of McIntire’s fellow performers skittering through the multi-planar compositions fail to convince us they represent a gregarious humanity doing their thing: they’re just a bunch of actors trying on period poses. Still, thanks to McIntire/Freed’s heroic presence, they are at least carelessly acceptable as denizens of a formative rock culture passionately pledged to keep a faith whose scriptures are being written right on the spot.