December Films Update 3
Seven more films I watched earlier this year. Does this bring me up to date? No, and not even for mid-October when I scheduled this post.
****
Hammer House Of Mystery And Suspense
Frank Lane (David McCallum) is the security chief at an auction house; a combination of technology and ability to spot when something is out of place makes him extremely good at it. The auction house is selling the Corvini jewels, a collection from an ancient Italian family. One of the necklaces changes colour if the person (woman) wearing it has cheated.
Meanwhile his neighbour Eva Bailey (Jan Francis) thinks she might be being stalked. Frank uses his equipment to set up cameras. He also starts following her himself, and watching and taking pictures of everyone who passes his house. He’s clearly paranoid, unable to switch off his awareness. He invites Eva to the auction house when they get some actors in period dress to try on the jewels, letting her have a go with a necklace. But when he checks the tape, the colour changes.
Creepy tense thriller, with an early focus on surveillance, matching this with the strangeness around the jewels. Indeed, is the risk to the inheritance linked to Eva’s stalker? And what can Frank do about it sat at this desk of screens?
Watch This: Clever crimes, weird history, surveillance
thriller
Don’t Watch This: Woman gets stalked, nothing’s going to
help her
Tuesday is the day they execute condemned criminals in this prison; there are two scheduled. Vincent Canelli (Edward G Robinson), a violent gangster and Peter Manning, a bank robber (who killed someone in his robbery). They offer Manning a two week stay of execution if he tells them where the $100,000 he stole is, but he won’t say unless they commute it to a life sentence.
Canelli’s girlfriend Hatti has a plan to get him out though and so the first part of the film revolves around the prison routine, as well as the witnesses to the execution. One of Canelli’s gang gets in as a reporter, and a coerced member of staff hides a gun for him. They break out all the condemned men along with some hostages, but Manning gets shot.
They hide out, with Canelli wanting Manning to tell him where the money is so he can get away. A claustrophobic, violent and paranoid film noir.
Watch This: Broody, atmospheric crime film
Don’t Watch This: Nasty criminals murder and kidnap
recklessly
Johnny English (Rowan Atkinson) works in the office in MI7, British Intelligence; his briefing gets Agent One, the top spy, killed, then at his funeral all the other agents are blown up (English of course in charge of security). Still, he’s the last agent standing so he and his assistant Bough (Ben Miller) are put in charge of security of the crown jewels.
The crown jewels restoration has been sponsored by Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich) a French private prison operator. At the reception is Lorna Campbell (Natalie Imbruglia). English is an oaf at the reception until there is a blackout; the crown jewels are stolen and English makes a mess of it.
Tracking down the crown jewels he chases the thieves, and suspects Sauvage. However every piece of evidence comes up empty. It turns out that Sauvage is in line for the throne and has three or four different plots to become king – and then turn the entire British Isles into a giant prison.
It’s a spy spoof comedy, written by two of the James Bond writers. There’s a few good jokes, and when Atkinson is on top of his game, especially with his physical comedy, it moves along amusingly. The film however is somewhat inconsistent in how he’s bad as a spy. Is he sloppy at his work? Is he physically inept? Does he lie and make stuff up? Is he easily distracted, especially by attractive women? Yes to all of these, but also sometimes no, he climbs, he does car stunts, he makes daring escapes. He’s tenacious and a patriot. Something of a mess, and much less of a challenge to mainstream spy films than, for example, Austin Powers.
Watch This: Entertaining light-hearted spy spoof
Don’t Watch This: None of the jokes have any real bite, it
has too much affection for guns and cars, and the final sequence goes on
ridiculously and not in an entertaining way
Peter Blood, once a pirate, is now a doctor on Jamaica, engaged to Dona Isabella and with a sideline in helping escaped slaves get away. Unfortunately a report comes in that Blood has gone back to pirating, and sacked Cartagena. Blood is arrested.
His old crew break him out and take over a ship and they go pirating again. However Blood has a plan, to find out who actually sacked Cartagena, clear his name and get back to Dona Isabella.
A rather thin plot (surely Blood, at home in Jamaica, could offer an alibi for sacking the greatest city on the Spanish Main) for some old fashioned buccaneering action.
Watch This: Some seaborne swashbuckling
Don’t Watch This: Period detail and seafaring detail are
somewhat thin on the ground
In the Rome of Tiberius the Princess Salome wants to marry Marcellus, Tiberius’s nephew (it’s not clear to me if this is a historical person). After Tiberius bans the match she leaves Rome on the same ship that is taking out Pontius Pilate to be governor of Judea. With him is Claudius* to whom he delegates dealing with the princess. She is demanding and he refuses to be demanded of.
Salome is the daughter of Queen Herodias; after the death of her father Herodias remarried his brother, King Herod. Herod is unpopular, rules with the support of the Romans who care little about him, his country or the local opinion. John the Baptist (discovered in the film baptising people) is a critic, claiming that Herod and Herodias’s marriage is adultery**. Herod believes John is the Messiah and a prophecy says that if a king of Judea kills the messiah he will have a hideous death (as happened to his father Herod the Great).
The situation becomes more complicated. Herod clearly lusts after his niece/stepdaughter Salome. Salome, hearing John preach challenges him; when the crowd turns nasty John insists they let her go. Salome suggests Herodias and she go into exile to avoid rising tensions. Herodias won’t, wanting Salome to inherit the throne. Claudius and Salome fall in love. Herod tries to navigate the difficult political terrain, arrests John to avoid trouble breaking out, and the Romans taking control. John meanwhile thinks he might have found the real messiah.
Loosely based on the biblical story, for a variety of reasons this film manages to have both Salome’s dance*** performed by Rita Heyworth, and to have her be innocent of John The Baptist’s death (SPOILERS for the gospels of Mark and Matthew) and in the middle of conversion to Christianity with her Roman lover. A good looking 1950s Hollywood epic when to have a crowd scene they’d get several hundred extras and when they needed an enormous palace they’d build one. Apparently what they didn’t need was historical or biblical accuracy.
Watch This: Rita Heyworth dances, lot of plotting and
intrigue
Don’t Watch This: Very poor on history, biblical story and
frankly no one really convinces
* Claudius claims to have served with Pilate in Britain, which is very unlikely as Britain had been invaded by Julius Caesar in 54-55 BC, then left along until the Claudian conquests, more than a decade in the future. Frankly the historical accuracy of this film is poor (stirrups in 1st century Rome?)
** Deuteronomy 25:5-10 suggests otherwise though this is at least in line with the biblical story that the film draws inspiration from.
*** Known as the dance of the seven veils thanks to the
Oscar Wilde play
It’s Superman reboot time! On the planet Krypton scientist Jor-El (Russell Crowe) is trying to get the staid ruling council to recognise the planet is unstable and their unchanging insularity has doomed them. General Zod (Michael Shannon) turns to violence, though frankly he’s less interested in the instability of the planet and wants to use the Genesis Birthing Chamber and the Codes which has all the Kryptonian genetic data to create a master race. He’s defeated and his followers are frozen in time and sent to the Phantom Zone; Jor-El and his wife have a natural born child, the first for a long time. Banned from leaving the planet, he sends his son Kal-El, who he puts the Codex in.
Krypton is destroyed; Kal-El arrives on Earth where he is discovered and brought up by Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and Martha (Diane Lane) Kent as their son Clark Kent. Clark grows up (to be played by Henry Cavill) and begins to display superpowers. Jonathan encourages him to keep them secret, even to the extent of waving Clark back from a tornado, which kills him. Clark grows a beard and travels the world looking for a purpose, occasionally doing secret heroic things.
Daily Planet ace reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams) joins an Arctic expedition to uncover an artefact buried under the ice for thousands of years. Clark Kent is also there as a worker (somehow passing the background check). He enters the artefact which is a Kryptonian scoutship from before Krypton turned insular; detecting a Kryptonian it activates and generates an Artificial Intelligence version of his father Jor-El. Lois Lane also enters the ship, the defences activate but Clark saves her and escapes with the ship. It gives him Superman’s suit and teaches him about Krypton and his destiny (to guide and protect humans on Earth).
Unable to get her editor Perry White (Laurence Fishburne) to print the story without more confirmation Lois Lane tries to track him down, eventually finding her way to Smallville where she learns that Jonathan Kent died to keep the secret and that Clark has been saving people all along. This version of Lois Lane has a conscience and decides to kill the story despite White intuiting that she got something.
This all gets put entirely aside when aliens arrive. It’s Zod and his associates, the only survivors of Krypton, released with the destruction of the planet. They’ve wandered across space, gathering equipment from various abandoned Kryptonian outposts, eventually tracking down Kal-El. He’s got the Codex, and so can recreate the Kryptonian race. However they also want to Krypto-form the Earth; Clark having grown up there has acclimatised, but they find the atmosphere unbreathable. A showdown ensues.
If Superman I, II, III and even IV and Returns liked to linger on shots of wonder and comedy, this one likes enormous and complicated fights and views of destruction. Though it tries it’s best on wonder as well, some of the stuff on Krypton looks magnificent and the film sometimes remembers to have a lovely shot of Earth or a spaceship. Not so much comedy though.
Henry Cavill appears shirtless a couple of times and has a irreplicable physique. Which is a bit of a problem; Christopher Reeve was a big guy, yet you looked at him and thought, if I went to the gym a bit more I could look like that. And so his Clark Kent was believable. Here we have a cool Clark Kent (if perhaps a bit of a mopey, even grim one). Clark Kent should not be cool.
Watch This: Kicked off ten years of superhero nonsense with
some spectacular action scenes and grim choices
Don’t Watch This: Superman is told not reveal himself by
both his fathers, mostly doesn’t until forced to, then destroys the last
survivors of another planet; losing all the themes of leadership, guidance and inspiratio
In small town America Steve and his girlfriend Jane spot a meteorite. Before they get to it an old man finds it; it breaks open and a small blob of jelly gets onto his hand. Steve and Jane take him to the doctor who is puzzled and alarmed by it’s growth. He decides to amputate, but before he can the blob grows, eats the man, the nurse and chases down the doctor. Steve sees this from the window and calls the police.
Unfortunately Steve’s teenage friends have been playing pranks and although it’s odd, the police think it’s a prank, call Steve and Jane’s parents and send them home. The Blob, not a prank, absorbs more people. Steve sneaks out, rounds up all his prank-loving friends to investigate. The Blob continues to be stealthy, so it takes a while before anyone believes them by which time people are trapped by it.
It's very much a 1950s science fiction monster horror film, though it fails to be laugh out loud terrible. There’s no big plot holes, of course the doctor doesn’t take enough precautions, he’s not seen a blob before, of course the police don’t believe the (idiot) teens, they’ve never seen a blob. The blob itself – featureless, all consuming – manages a quiet menace that elevates the film a little.
Watch This: Classic science fiction monster film
Don’t Watch This: Everyone is too earnest, too stereotypical
For Another View On The Blob: My review of The Blob Takes Manhattan by
Chelsea Stickles
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