March Films Update 3

Ten more films I watched in 2024

****

1. The Enemy Below

It’s the South Atlantic during World War 2. The USS Haynes is a destroyer escort patrolling, looking for German U-Boats (and surface raiders). They’ve got a new captain, and in a clever move we don’t see him for a while, instead hearing what the crew have to say; that his last ship was sunk by a U-Boat in the North Atlantic, that they don’t know if he’s any good. Then at night, in rough weather, the radar spots something and the Captain (Lt Commander Murrell, played by Robert Mitchum) emerges from his cabin and takes command. He stalks the contact, confirms it’s an enemy U-Boat.

It's a U-Boat commanded by Kapitän zur See von Stolberg (Curd Jûrgens). He’s a veteran of World War 1, pessimistic about the course of the war, unimpressed by the committed Nazi officer on board. Yet he has his duty, to rendezvous with a surface raider to receive captured British codes for delivery to Germany.

This is his weakness. Murrell correctly interprets von Stolberg’s movements as being on a particular heading, so when he loses the U-Boat he’s able to use the Haynes superior speed to search along the path and find it again. He uses regular, continuing depth charge attacks to damage the submarine and put them under stress. Yet this very regularity gives von Stolberg a chance to attack leading to a final conflict between them.

A very simple duel between submarine and submarine hunter, lifted by superior lead actors, some clever scenes and parallels. The mirrored scenes of crew on each vessel reading (on the American ship one character has a comic, the other a famous novel; on the German this is a magazine and Mein Kampf, highlighting the committed Nazi character). The danger in even normal operations is shown. A character is injured while loading the depth charge launcher. All in all a good war film, a bit cleverer than I expected.

Watch This: Classic sub versus destroyer combat with some good leads
Don’t Watch: The futility of war, the obsession with details of machines

2. Sink The Bismarck!

Captain Shepherd (Kenneth More) takes over as head of operations at the admiralty in London (buried deep underneath in fact, making it effectively a bomb shelter). He’s a bit stricter than the previous chief, insisting that personnel wear correct uniform, that a WRNS not be addressed by her first name and requesting that officers not eat at their desks. Almost immediately – and before everyone’s got a chance to settle in – they get news that the Bismarck, a German battleship, escorted by the Prinz Eugen, a heavy cruiser, have left port from occupied Norway.

It's 1941 and having such a heavily armed ship loose in the North Atlantic, capable of defeating convoy escorts, could be disasterous. Losing track of the Bismarck in overcast weather Shepherd and the Royal Navy are faced with a dilemma. The Bismarck might attempt to break through almost anywhere between Scotland and Greenland. They have battleships and battlecruisers to fight and beat her, but not enough to cover every point.

Shepherd takes ships from a convoy forming up to get enough coverage to put two capital ships in every point. The Bismarck is discovered in the Denmark Strait and engages the Hood and The Prince Of Wales. The Hood is destroyed; the Prince of Wales is damaged, damages the Bismarck in return and is forced to withdraw. The Bismarck breaks contact.

Shepherd has to make choices, gamble on where the Bismarck will go. He does so, the Admiral backing him up, and in turn he gets his staff to respect him, especially the WRNS second officer Davis. He stays in the operations office night and day. (One ongoing concern is that they keep talking about the operation in Crete getting sticky, which means that his use of the force at Gibraltar, covering the Western Mediterranean, while the navy is fully committed in the Eastern Mediterranean, risks more than just the Bismarck getting away).

It's a film about making decisions and then seeing them through and paying the cost. To dramatize this Shepherd’s son is a torpedo bomber on a plane on the Ark Royal at Gibraltar; Shepherd has to order them into action, despite his son being the only family he has left. The German Admiral also has to see through his decisions, being aboard the Bismarck. And there are smaller reflections of this; one of Shepherd’s officers is late so he schedules him to three night shifts. When he requests a change due to his fiancée, a nurse, shipping out the next morning Shepherd sticks to it.

What it also is about is ships at sea and the wartime experience. Of people having to work themselves ragged, and also live their lives. Made in 1957, it uses Ed Murrow, a famous American radio journalist who reported from London during the war; he reuses some of his wartime scripts on the events to frame events in the film.

Watch This: Classic war film of people in bunkers suffering, though not as much as people on ships, which is where the people in bunkers want to be
Don’t Watch This: Check out the real history instead

3. It Came From Beneath The Sea

An American nuclear submarine goes out on a shakedown cruise. They discover something massive, get trapped, but manage to return with strange material in their propeller. This brings together Commander Pete Mathews, Professor Lesley Joyce and Dr John Carter (not that one). They analyse the material and identify it as octopus.

This has taken some time. In the meantime several boats have vanished; later a Canadian freighter sinks but the crew are rescued. The first one to talk about the octopus is sent to the psychiatrist; not wanting to be thought insane they all stop talking about it. Professor Joyce interviews them informally in a bugged office, pretending to be staff at the hospital and they tell all.

The rest of the film is about hunting and killing a Giant Octopus. Professor Joyce, as the only woman with a speaking role, has to do the screaming when it appears, she also has to be the love interest for Commander Mathews as is obvious when she rejects his old-fashioned attempts to find a better qualified man (there is none) and she wants to leave because she need to secure funding for her research (the Navy gets it for her). Silly, predictable, a little over-earnest though it moves fairly briskly and has a little charm.

Watch This: Old school monster movie, the octopus is pretty good
Don’t Watch This: Predictable story, perfunctory romance, very silly monster

4. After Blue

On the planet After Blue Roxy and her friends (who hate and bully her) find a woman buried up to her neck on the beach. Roxy digs her up; it’s notorious outlaw/legend Kate Bush (no not that one) who has one hairy arm and an eye in her groin. Kate Bush promises Roxy three wishes, kills the girls who didn’t help her and escapes into the mountains. The elders of the village tell her mother Zora that they will be outlawed unless they recapture Kate Bush so mother and daughter head into the mountains after her.

After Blue is inhabited only by women as something in the atmosphere kills men. Zora is a hairdresser; one of her jobs is to remove the hair that grows on women’s faces. Groups from different countries formed villages on After Blue; Zora and Roxy are from France, at one point they meet English-speakers and also Kate Bush is from the Polish settlement. They mostly don’t have high technology, except that up in the mountains they meet Sternberg who has some androids (and yes, androids as well as gynoids). For some reason the weapons are all named after fashion brands, Gucci, Louis Vitton, Paul Smith.

For some reason? This is a surreal art house space Western, the space where the mundane and the absurd meet is at the heart of it. Why shouldn’t fashion brands make weapons for export to other planets? Or alternatively, why shouldn’t the hard to find almost unique earth weapons be given names from the legendary half-forgotten planet?

In any case it’s about sex and violence, about women on a quest meeting odd people and getting caught up in their strange mystical rites. About nudity and art. About fairytales and messiahs. About accepting what’s going on in the film and not trying to impose too much structure on it.

Watch This: Strange, brain-breaking science fiction Western
Don’t Watch This: Just odd, also mostly in French with subtitles

5. Lee (2023)

In 1977 Lee Miller is being interviewed and we flash back to forty years before. She’s an American model and aspiring photographer in France where she meets artist Roger Penrose and falls in love. The two of them move to London. WW2 intervenes; Miller goes to work as a photographer for Vogue where she works around and within the limitations of the war. She wants to be a war correspondent but can’t because she’s a woman.

In 1944 she’s allowed to go to Normandy, though at first the American command won’t let her forward to the fighting. Then they do; she teams up with David Scherman and the two of them drive around in a jeep documenting the war. She photographs French Resistance members publicly shaming French women for collaborating (having sex with) the occupiers. In Paris she tracks down some of her old friends and learns about people who went missing, arrested and taken away on trains to never come back.

This leads her to the concentration camps, where she records the horrific conditions and crimes of the Nazis. In one (and I say this deliberately) surreal sequence after spending the day at Dachau she and Scherman gatecrash a party held by American officers in Adolf Hitler’s apartment in Munich, culminating in her being photographed in Hitler’s bath.

This is based on Miller’s biography by her son, who did not know of her wartime exploits until after her death in 1977. As such it focuses very much on Miller sui generis; ignoring her work with surrealists, making little of her deliberate framing and juxtaposition of elements in her work. The discovery of the camps and her insistence on the pictures being published is not given context of the requests by broadcasters and reporters to spread them as widely as possible.

Watch This: Amazing biopic of the wartime exploits of an extraordinary photographer
Don’t Watch This: Some very grim scenes and slightly odd feeling setpieces to recreate the real photos

6. Predator

In Central America Major “Dutch” Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his military rescue team are brought in by his old friend Dillon (Carl Weathers). A helicopter with a minister of this country has gone down on the border. Rebels are in their sanctuary over the border and they need to get him back, so they head out into the jungle.

Almost immediately they find things are wrong. Rebel tracks lead from the wrecked helicopter (which is outfitted for surveillance rather than transport) but there are also other tracks of American military boots. They find some skinned human bodies which they realise are American special forces (Dutch knows one, Jim Harper, Green Berets out of Fort Bragg). They continue to the rebel base and attack.

There Dutch discovers he’s been fooled by Dillon. There were Soviet advisors with the rebels and they had planned a major attack. There was no rescue, only an attempt to get information. They take a prisoner, Anna, and despite their disgust continue in an attempt to escape.

What we, the audience, know is that a spacecraft came down and something has been watching, something with heat vision, and also active camouflage. The Predator, who killed and skinned the Green Berets. The Predator attacks, taking the team one by one, despite them setting traps. Dutch manages to escape when covered in mud, realises it masks his body heat, sets up improvised traps for the final confrontation.

A classic monster film, lifted by the backdrop of cold war paranoia and betrayal. The American special forces unit with superior weaponry and training find themselves outmatched with Dutch having to use the tactics of a guerilla to succeed, though the film does not dwell over much on this theme.

Watch This: Superior science fiction action film well made with many interesting ideas
Don’t Watch This: Run, go, get to da choppa!

7. Sasquatch Sunset

Four sasquatches in the Pacific northwest travel and live over the course of a year. They seek food, have sex, drum on trees to try and find other sasquatches. One of them, drunk on fermented fruit and high on mushrooms, is killed by a mountain lion. The remaining ones find trees with red paint marks, they cross a road and defecate and urinate on it to mark it. Finding a cut tree in a river one of the climbs on it, then falls off when it rolls, trapping him and drowning him.

They discover a campsite. (No humans appear in the film, only the sasquatches and some wildlife). They turn on a stereo, and listen to Love To Hate You by Erasure before wrecking the site. The pregnant female gives birth; on more than one occasion the baby seems on the verge of death. Finally they find themselves in a human town and encounter the sasquatch museum.

An absurd and absurdist film, sometimes filmed like a nature documentary, sometimes like a drama. These human-like creatures, so able yet so poorly adapted to their habitat, reflect something back on us. Or perhaps it’s just some people in hairy suits with visible genitals tearing up the woods.

Watch This: Mute exploration of human and animal relationship with nature and themselves
Don’t Watch This: Slow, depressing, the joke wears thin

8. Gunfight At The O.K. Corral (1957)

Ed Bailey rides into Fort Griffin, Texas, intending to kill former-dentist, professional gambler and notorious gunfighter Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) for killing Bailey’s brother. Warned by his girlfriend Kate Fisher he nevertheless goes down to the saloon. Also in town is Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster), there to take into custody notorious members of the “Cowboy” gang Ike Clanton and Johnny Ringo. The sheriff has let them go; Holliday won’t help as he has previously been arrested by Morgan Earp, Wyatt’s brother. When Bailey tries to kill Holliday, Holliday is arrested. The townsfolk, sick of Holliday killing people, gather to lynch him so Kate and Wyatt help him escape.

Wyatt returns to Dodge City, Kansas, where he’s town marshal, only to find Holliday and Kate there. He tries to run him out of town, but Holliday claims he has no money so Wyatt gets a promise from him to not fight in town. Holliday turns out not to be his biggest problem; notorious gambler Laura Denbow is in town and causes disruption by playing in the saloon. This is against town regulations, so Wyatt arrests her; some negotiation lets her loose and allows her to play in private rooms. When a bank robber kills a cashier and all of the deputies are out chasing another outlaw Wyatt calls in favour from Holliday and deputises him, the two tracking down the bank robbers and killing them in a gunfight.

Johnny Ringo comes into town and sick of Holliday’s drunken meanness Kate leaves Holliday for Ringo. Ringo taunts Holliday who refuses to fight him. Then some outlaws come into town and take over a dancehall; Wyatt and Holliday stop them, Holliday shooting Ringo in the arm.

Wyatt gets a message from his brother Morgan to go to Tombstone, Arizona. His burgeoning romance with Laura falls apart as he rides off; Holliday comes with him.

Entering Tombstone, passing by both the Boot Hill cemetery and the O.K. Corral, Wyatt learns the situation. Ike Clanton and his gang of cowboys have thousands of rustled cattle from Mexico. They want to ship them out, and the only way is through Tombstone railway station. The county sheriff is in their pay, but town marshal Morgan (DeForrest Kelley), and two other Earp brothers Virgil and Jimmy, both deputised, won’t let them. Tensions rise as most of the characters from earlier arrive in town, leading inevitably to the confrontation known as The Gunfight At The O.K. Corral.

A classic Western, and indeed one of the ones that revisionary Westerns measure themselves against. Holliday brings some self-centred darkness to it, a hero who is abusive to a woman, aware of his inevitable death (from TB), as careless of other’s lives as his own. Thus making an unlikely friendship with the noble and upstanding Wyatt and his good-hearted brothers! For that matter one of the younger Clantons gets a moment of character, caught between wanting to be like his father and brothers and knowing that this is a desperate and dangerous life.

Loosely based on real events, taking Wyatt Earp’s self-serving version as the base, then embroidering on them. They have one epic song, that is used throughout, the suitable verse being sung over it (the deeper, darker Boot Hill verse whenever they pass a Boot Hill cemetery etc). The fight scenes are passable, some of the more tense saloon bits good.

Watch This: Classic Western with fights, standoffs and even a tiny bit of politics
Don’t Watch This: Not that classic, not one with scenes and lines that get quoted, parodied and ripped off
And Never Forget: Frankie Laine's epic Gunfight At The O.K. Corral

9. Thirteen Ghosts (2001)

Cyrus Kriticos and his assistant Dennis Rafkin capture a dangerous ghost, but Cyrus and some of his men are killed. A lawyer informs Cyrus’s nephew, Arthur, that he’s inherited the house. Arthur, a widower whose finances went into a mess after his wife died a year ago, goes out with his teen daughter Kathy, younger son Bobby and the nanny, Maggie.

The house is a long way out in the woods, and made of glass, with the walls covered in Latin writing. Dennis, pretending to be a power company engineer goes in the house with them. After they go in and admire several rooms, the lawyer sneaks away and steals a lot of money, which activates the house. Activates? It turns out the basement is a set of ghost traps, and by setting it going the ghosts get released and as the device in the house, or that is the house, progresses, it performs a ritual.

This is horror film and one that gets quite gruesome at times. The lawyer is cut in half with a door, the ghosts – visible through special glasses – have all suffered horribly and in turn attack nastily. As the people trapped in the house learn more and figure out some of what’s going on they’re able to use the limitations and eventually sidetrack the machine.

Loosely based on the 1960 film Thirteen Ghosts, it takes the implicit horror of that film, hidden under a light hearted all-American cast and script, and adds to it monster ghosts.

Watch This: Monstrous, gruesome horror with some clever bits
Don’t Watch This: Murder, mutilation, the dead taking revenge etc

10. The Neverending Story

Bastien is told to stop daydreaming at school; on the way some bullies chase him and he takes refuge in a bookshop. He asks the owner about the book he’s reading (“The Neverending Story”); the owner recommends against it, but Bastien takes it with him.

Late to school Bastien skips class to go into the abandoned, dramatic attic and reads the book. It’s about the land of Fantasia, which is being destroyed by a force called “The Nothing.” Some messengers (a rock giant, a racing snail rider, and a bat rider) have been sent from three different lands to the Childlike Empress to ask for help.

The Childlike Empress is ill though. The young warrior Atreyu is given an amulet and sent to find a cure. He and his horse go to Moria in a swamp; the horse is drowned. Moria can’t help but sends him to the Southern Oracle, ten thousand miles away. Gmork, a giant wolf sent by the Nothing to kill him closes in. Fortunately he meets Falkor, a luck dragon, who flies him to the Southern Oracle. After some difficulty the Oracle tells him he needs to find a child from outside Fantasia who can give the Empress a new name.

Atreyu gets back to the Empress as Fantasia falls apart, grief stricken he hasn’t found the child. But of course he has, it’s Bastien who was reading the book. Surprise, the fantasy was real! Anyway this is fine as a kid’s film, the twist is a bit well known, the adventures a little weightless.

Watch This: Fun kid’s fantasy film
Don’t Watch This: Lot of swamps of sadness and luck dragons turning up when needed