Film Reviews by Count Otto Black

Don Siegel gave the world, amongst other things, "Dirty Harry", "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers", and "Flaming Star', which is that rarest of beasts, a good Elvis Presley film, so even though he was in many ways America's answer to Michael Winner, he wasn't exactly a no-talent nobody. And in 1974 Michael Caine was an A-list star. So why had I never even heard of this movie until now?

Unfortunately the answer to that question turns out to be the obvious one: it's terrible. "Riveting", says the description on the previous page. Yes, I suppose it is, in the sense of being a clunky assemblage of mismatched parts held together with obvious bolts. Its problems become apparent even before it's properly begun. A children's choir sings "Under The Spreading Chestnut Tree" while the opening credits are spelled out in gaily-coloured alphabet bricks over footage of two schoolboys playing in the countryside. Will this movie be about sinister goings-on at a school or something? Nope. The two boys are very marginal characters indeed, it isn't about childhood at all, and that song has nothing to do with anything. Someone, presumably the director, must have decided that starting the film in a quirkily original way was what mattered, and whether or not it fitted thematically with everything else was beside the point. Which sums up most, though by no means all of what's wrong with the entire film.

This is what I call an ATTH movie: And Then This Happens. Strangely disjointed events occur one after another as if the script started out as a list of bullet-points and some unfortunate screenwriter had to join them up as best he could. The bad guys do things that serve no purpose other than to establish their badness, and then clumsily attempt to justify them to each other and the audience. The dialogue is howlingly dreadful, especially the moment when the villain casually reveals a vital clue to Michael Caine for no reason at all because if he hadn't the film wouldn't have had an ending. And, worst of all - this, by the way, is the most abysmal piece of screenwriting I've ever seen in a movie from a major studio - in one scene Michael Caine has to do a convincing impersonation of Donald Pleasance's character over the phone, but unfortunately his acting skills don't quite stretch to sounding exactly like whoever his co-star happens to be. This film's solution? Donald Pleasance is forced to play his entire part as if he's doing a bad impersonation of himself. Yes, really.

I'd give it two stars because the incredibly inept script makes it sort of watchable in all the wrong ways, but I'm docking one for the gratuitous scenes of young children repeatedly being brutalised just so we know the baddies deserve to be killed. This is Don Siegel at his worst. He even manages to clumsily shoehorn drugs into the plot in case we've forgotten that hippies are evil. Also, there's very little indeed of the action you'd expect in a Don Siegel thriller, because action costs money, and most of the budget appears to have been blown on moving the story from London to Paris and back again for no discernible reason. So instead of thrills, we get a lot of obvious padding in which peculiar characters behave quirkily. Imagine a version of "Taken" in which almost every scene where anybody dies is replaced by footage of Donald Pleasance pretending to be someone pretending to be Donald Pleasance. It really is like that, only worse. Michael Caine sleepwalks through most of his scenes, and Donald Pleasance looks genuinely miserable. I don't blame either of them.

This extremely odd movie was made at a time when Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe franchise was raking in big bucks, but the small portion of Poe's output suitable for cinematic adaptation was fast running out. Corman's typically couldn't-give-a-monkey's solution was to stick the titles of unfilmable works by Poe onto just about anything starring Vincent Price. The basis for this film's screenplay was a poem about a man grieving for his dead wife who becomes even more depressed after a raven flies into the room. Since that's literally all that happens in the source material, Corman had to fill a gap almost as large as the entire movie, so naturally he turned a poem about morbid grief into a borderline Pythonesque comedy revolving around Peter Lorre's transformation into a very disgruntled bird.

In a pseudo-rennaissance fantasy realm where magic is seemingly part of everyday life, though we see nothing of the world beyond the main characters' homes because Corman can't afford to show us anything he doesn't have to, three wizards, the gloomy Craven (Vincent Price), the drunken Bedlo (Peter Lorre), and the sinister Scarabus (Boris Karloff), come very close to delivering a low-budget parody of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" in Shakespearean drag with magic instead of guns five years before it was made. With slightly more money behind it, and a director who, unlike Corman, really understood comedy (we're talking about the man who edited "Death Race 2000" to ribbons because he didn't see why it needed any jokes), it might have been an offbeat masterpiece rather than the self-indulgent yet strangely enjoyable muddle it ended up as.

It's not a great film, or even a particularly good one. However, it's fun, and that excuses almost anything. No excuses are needed for the gleefully ramshackle magic duel whose special effects aren't anywhere near state-of-the-art even for 1963, because by that point it's all gotten so silly that it's essentially a live-action cartoon, although unfortunately a more cartoonish pace is the one thing it needs most. Most of the cast are obviously enjoying themselves immensely. Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in particular seem to be having a ball.

Boris Karloff sometimes looks a little uncomfortable, but he's the bad guy so we're meant to take him at least half seriously. As for the others, no such limitations apply, and they know it; femme fatale Hazel Court can barely keep a straight face. The young couple who always have to be in films like this even if they're a waste of space are a waste of space, but it's unintentionally hilarious to see an incredibly youthful Jack Nicholson, overawed by the more stellar members of the cast, self-consciously fading into the background. And watch for the first awkward try-out of his trademark "Heeeere's Jackie!" grinning maniac routine.

I'm surprised Roger Corman thought a sub-genre so small it consisted almost entirely of his own Poe films was big enough to need spoofing, but spoof it he did, though I noticed that the original cinematic trailer included as a DVD extra tried to disguise the fact that it was a comedy, as if even American International Pictures were baffled by their own movie the moment they saw the finished product. But speaking personally, I don't think "Doctor Strange" would have been a worse movie if it had included a few levitating armchairs and a spell that turned people into raspberry jam.

PS - Roger Corman finished this film ahead of schedule and everyone involved was still under contract for the next few days, so he made another movie using a script written literally overnight. The result was "The Terror", which truly has to be seen to be believed!

PPS - "The Raven" (1963) has no connection with "The Raven" (1942) even though Boris Karloff's in both of them.

It could be argued that both the strongest and weakest points of this uncompromising drama are that it isn't "The Godfather". Immensely powerful though that trilogy is (two-thirds of it, anyway), its characters are larger than life, and have justly been called Shakespearean. The protagonists in this sordid tale are realistic in a way the Corleone family aren't, and that makes them both more horrifying and less interesting. I was reminded of Ben Wheatley's "Down Terrace", a black comedy so black it's debatable whether it qualifies as a comedy at all, but even that kinda sorta has jokes in it. If this film has a central theme, it's the banality of evil. The Puccios are dull. They seem to spend most of their time having family dinners at which ordinary everyday things are discussed. Except of course when they're kidnapping and murdering innocent people for money. As you do.

The story is told from the point of view of the eldest son, essentially a nice guy who just wants a normal life, whose inner conflict between loyalty to his family and not wanting to help them commit horrible crimes grows as the story progresses. Unfortunately he's not a very interesting person, and he never really does anything that matters, allowing himself to be controlled by his much stronger-willed father and swept along by events until they're out of anyone's control. Basing a film on real life means you can't rewrite everything you don't find dramatically satisfying, but this isn't a documentary and many scenes in it are at least partly fictional, so the scriptwriters could surely have made their monsters less boring. The father, who is depicted as being personally responsible for just about everything, is a cold-eyed cipher we never come to know or understand; the young man whose point of view we share nearly all the time is well-meaning but too weak to defy his evil dad and that's about it; and the rest of the characters, especially the women, are basically furniture.

What I found most baffling was the complete absence of any apparent motivation. I could understand the backstory being sketchy because Argentinian audiences would be as familiar with the Puccios as we are with the Krays, but there's literally none at all. And although it's vaguely implied that they've been doing this kind of thing for years and belong to some sort of Argentinian Mafia, it's so unclear that I googled the Puccios to get the real story, and I was surprised to find that the crimes depicted in the movie are the only ones they're known to have committed, which at least explains why as ruthless career criminals go they seem so amateurish.

The hopelessly inadequate characterisation of just about everyone prevented me from caring about them as much as I needed to if the film was going to truly engage me in the way it was meant to. Anyone who isn't a psychopath understands that what these people did was absolutely wrong, so merely showing us how evil they were is neither useful nor interesting. How did they get to be that way? That's an interesting question which is never answered. Instead, the story consists of bad things happening while the guy we're supposed to like feels really guilty but doesn't do anything about it. And since the crimes start out very bad indeed and don't get any worse, the dramatic tension doesn't build in the slightest. Very bad people do very bad things until something makes them stop. The end. This is one of those deep, dark, grimly serious films which people pretend to like more than they really do because they feel that they ought to. It left me feeling slightly depressed but it didn't genuinely move me, and considering what it's about, it really should have.

Although I never found the self-consciously weird and wacky "The Mighty Boosh" as funny as it was cracked up to be, and what I've seen of other projects masterminded by the same team hasn't impressed me much either, this film involves many talented people and its basic premise sounded pretty good, so I thought it might be a lot of fun. I was wrong.

That basic premise of a washed-up actor getting into a ghastly predicament because a crazed killer thinks the character he plays is real is the only idea they've got, and the peculiarly ham-fisted way they use it simply doesn't stretch to anywhere near an hour and a half. The writers obviously know this, because early on the main plot very suddenly and clumsily stops, is completely forgotten about for ages while the story shifts to the hero's extremely clichéd attempts to rekindle an old romance, during which most of what humour there is derives from a Dutch supporting character's difficulty with the English language, and then abruptly kicks in again much later on. And oddly, although the writers seem to take it for granted that the concept of a cheesy eighties detective with a daft name who is basically a cross between the Six Million Dollar Man and Bergerac is so intrinsically hilarious that it can carry the film all by itself, Julian Barratt spends a great deal more screen-time playing Richard Thorncroft, a cross between David Brent and Alan Partridge who isn't anywhere near as funny as either, than he does playing Thorncroft in character as Mindhorn.

The script is just plain awful, with a slapdash approach to pace, character, and pretty much everything that borders on randomness. Veering wildly between grim black humour and zany slapstick, the plot is less a narrative than a series of barely connected situations that happen to involve the same people. Many of the jokes are older than God. The police are morons too useless to catch a suspected murderer who literally has a mental age of nine without the help of a fictional character, not because this is funny, but because making them even more stupid and inept than Thorncroft/Mindhorn is the only excuse the writers can think of to justify him being involved at all. Steve Coogan in a minor supporting rôle effortlessly reminds us he's a much better actor than anyone who's in this movie for longer than him. And if you're wondering what Kenneth Branagh has to do with any of this, it's a classic example of hiring a really famous actor for one day so you can put his name on the poster. Bela Lugosi's in "Plan 9 From Outer Space" for longer than Branagh's in "Mindhorn"!

If references to the Isle of Man (which offers very generous tax incentives to films shot there, including this one) were in themselves funny, this would be the funniest film ever. Unfortunately it's not, though it might be the Isle-of-Man-est film ever, so I'd recommend it to anyone trying to make up their mind whether or not to book a holiday there. But as a comedy, not so much. The only moment that genuinely grabbed my attention was a closing credit I had to rewind in case I was seeing things, but no, it really did say: "Executive Producer: Ridley Scott". The story of how they persuaded someone like him to have his name associated with something like this would probably be a much funnier movie than the one they actually made.

This odd, erratic, and rather muddled film is difficult to categorise. The labels it gets here are "Horror" and "Satanic" (and "Classic", though on this site that just means it's a film), but like a lot of Italian movies from that era, it doesn't care which genre you think it's in so long as you know it's for grown-ups, and the 18 certificate tells you that much. Though as seventies Italian 18-cert movies go, this one is very non-violent indeed, that 18 classification being for nudity and sex, almost all of which is in one scene that's less explicit than silly.

As Poe observed in "The Premature Burial", being buried alive is one of the scariest things you can possibly imagine, especially if you're fully conscious while it's happening but completely paralysed so you can't indicate that you're still alive, and that makes it an excellent basis for a horror story. Movies have been showing us variations on this truly nightmarish theme since "Vampyr" in 1932, but seldom as ghoulishly as this one does, since the poor chap isn't merely awaiting his burial; they're going to perform an autopsy on him first...

Yet it's not really a very scary movie. Since our hero turns up "dead" in the first scene and the whole story is told in flashback as he awaits his ghastly fate, there's no suspense until the last few minutes because what are the chances that the narrator will be dissected before the end of the film? Also, we have nearly 100 minutes to get used to his predicament, safe in the knowledge that it'll be about an hour and a half before it becomes significantly worse, and since that's the only true element of horror, there's not a lot else to be scared of.

"The Wicker Man" works because, right from the outset, the hero is surrounded by people so weird that Summerisle might as well be on another planet, and we've got a fairly good idea of what's going on all along. This film doesn't work nearly so well because it's essentially an atmospheric though not exactly action-packed thriller about an American journalist trying to find his vanished girlfriend in a Communist country whose cops are unhelpful to put it mildly, which for almost its entire running-time looks as though it might be leading up to the discovery of a series of sordid but fairly ordinary sex crimes, with an oddly irrelevant horrific framing story that feels like a short film edited randomly into a completely different movie starring the same actors. And then, very abruptly indeed, it all turns incredibly strange just before the end in an outrageously over-the-top scene where the entire plot is suddenly explained, so hastily that I suspect they were trying to get it over with before the audience had time to realise how little sense it made.

In technical terms, this is a top-notch DVD with an excellent-quality picture in proper widescreen, and a choice of subtitled Italian or English dubbing. Most of the music is by Ennio Morricone, but his heart clearly wasn't in it, because if I hadn't noticed his name in the opening credits I'd have assumed some hack was trying to copy his style, but not trying very hard or very well. However, I did enjoy the cameo by Jürgen Drews, an obscure German singer who for literally no reason at all pops up in Prague in the middle of the night and belts out a hilariously bad protest song about butterflies and blood. It reminded me irresistibly of the ballad LSD sings in "The Producers" about a flower that gets flushed down the toilet. My guess is that the Italian director didn't know how absurd the English lyrics were. Why haven't any cool young bands covered this song ironically yet?

This very atypical and deservedly obscure Hammer film looks so old-fashioned that a few minutes in I skipped back to the credits to see what year it was made, wrongly thinking the date given above must be a misprint for 1954. I suppose the fact that it's in black and white could be a homage to "Psycho", with which it shares some plot elements. But I think it's more likely that Hammer didn't want to waste money on colour film stock for what they knew would be a second-rate film; the lack of well-known names in the cast suggests that too.

If this site allowed half-stars I'd give it one and a half, but I'll go up to two because it's not one-star putrid, just extremely weak. A misguided attempt to reboot "Gaslight" (1940) with a transfusion from "Psycho" (1960), it has the kind of plot an Italian giallo slasher would have handled infinitely better by turning everything up to eleven in glorious blood-soaked technicolour and not giving a monkey's about plausibility. Unfortunately this half-hearted and, for Hammer, surprisingly gore-free non-thriller falls completely flat on all counts. Character and motivation are inadequate or non-existent, and there's absolutely nobody you like enough to care about. The script's only remotely original feature is that the "twist ending" occurs halfway through, and then, when we think the entire plot has been explained, the second half builds up to another even twistier ending. But since both "surprises" are so formulaic you can see them coming the proverbial mile off, instead of twice the thrills you just get a second helping of something too bland for you to want more of it.

A special mention must go to Jenny Linden, a mediocre actress horribly miscast as a 16-year-old when she was obviously in her mid-twenties, causing her immature behaviour and the fact that everyone treats her like a child to unintentionally seem a lot weirder than any of the scripted indications that she's a bit mental. But I'm afraid the only thing about this wearily predictable, poorly acted, and flatly directed psychodrama that really got my attention was the doll which kept popping up all the time because the laziest way to make your movie look "nightmarish" is to have creepy retro dolls lying about. Every time that thing was on screen, I was thinking: "Blimey, that's the least politically correct toy I've ever seen!" Though since the entire plot relies on the assumption that all women are so mentally fragile they'll turn into homicidal loonies if they get a wee bit upset, casual toy-box racism is the least of its sins against the Great God PC.

Not that you'll need an excuse to watch something else instead, because there's absolutely nothing remarkable about this film. It reminded me of a below-par episode of "Tales Of The Unexpected" padded out to feature length. And by the way, it's only got one actual nightmare scene because to portray truly disturbing dreams on film you need a lot more talent than Freddie Francis.

Jean-Pierre Melville, credited in this film simply as "Melville" because he was too cool to have a first name (or to use his real surname, which was Grumbach), was in many ways the thinking man's Quentin Tarantino. His films typically, though not always, involved tough guys wearing immaculate trench-coats and hats tilted at the perfect stylish angle doing tremendously manly things in a strangely stylised world where having an unbreakable code of honour is a strength, not the fatal weakness or hypocritical façade it would be for more realist Scorsese-type gangsters. This approach works best in "Army Of Shadows", based on Melville's real-life experiences in the French Resistance, because it makes sense for honourable and genuinely heroic people to be outlaws and killers when the law is enforced by Nazis, and in the ultra-stylised "Le Samourai", which was loosely remade as "The Killer"by John Woo.

It doesn't work quite so well here. The director himself described the movie as an unashamed love-letter to Paris, and the city is by far the most interesting and sympathetic character, which keeps the film extremely watchable during long stretches where, if you think about it, not much is actually happening. The trouble is, at the heart of the story is a gaping hole. It wears an impeccably neat trench-coat and a stylishly tilted hat, and it's called Bob. Who is Bob the Gambler? He's a more or less reformed criminal who never does anything really bad, and he gambles. Although he's a compulsive gambler who seems to lose most of the time, he lives in luxury because he's the hero and he's cool so he must have clothes and surroundings that make him look good even if logically he shouldn't. And of course everyone loves him, including the cop whose job is supposed to be arresting people like him.

Why does everyone love Bob? Because Melville loves Bob, therefore the script makes the other characters constantly remind each other and the audience what a great guy Bob is. I just found him smug, and he prefers men to women so much that I wondered if he was supposed to come across as gay, especially as the film portrays women as, at best, fickle dim-witted nuisances who can't keep their mouths shut, and exist mainly to cause problems for men by being too sexy to ignore. But apparently that's just Melville's male chauvinism, which was extreme even for 1956. Though it has to be said that, even if she's not the world's best actress, Isabelle Corey is perfectly cast as somebody too sexy to ignore, and since this movie is French rather than American, it isn't the least bit coy about her casual promiscuity. If her acting career had lasted a bit longer, she would undoubtedly have been one of the more memorable early Bond Girls. She's got so much more screen presence than Roger Duchesne as boring old Bob that I wish the entire movie had been about her, and how her presence disrupts this ridiculous little world of cardboard man-children.

But despite the perfunctory characterisation and plot - as heist movies go, this one is weirdly short on scenes directly involving the robbery everything is supposed to be leading up to - it draws the viewer in like a superb but unfinished painting, where a master's hand has filled in every detail of the background, but the figures in the foreground are only sketches. So in its own way it's strangely enjoyable. Though I wouldn't recommend it to militant feminists.

This sprawling, visually extravagant, and incredibly self-indulgent film (technically it's two films, but it's really one very long film released in two parts) was made at a time when Fritz Lang's greatest movies were more than 30 years old, his health was in decline, and he was rapidly losing his eyesight. He knew his next film was probably going to be his last (though actually he did make one more movie, the third part of the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, released 27 years after part two), so he said goodbye to Hollywood, where he'd never quite fitted in anyway, and returned to his native Germany to film a trashy, long-forgotten novel written four decades previously by Thea von Harbou which he'd nearly made as a silent film in 1921, mainly because at the time she was his wife. Ah well, better late than never!

Nostalgia rules supreme in this magnificent-looking though sometimes slow-moving melodrama about taboo-breaking love between an incredibly manly if somewhat one-dimensional European and an Indian dancing girl who is every Mysterious East cliché rolled into one, though actually she's mixed-race, a plot-point they obviously had to hastily write in to explain why Debra Paget looks so un-Indian. Subtle this ain't! Everyone's a stereotype to the point where having a beard and being evil are the same thing. The (slightly) dusky maiden loves the white he-man because he chased off a tiger that fancied having her for breakfast armed only with a small piece of firewood. He loves her because she's Debra Paget with not much on. But the maharajah loves her too, because if he didn't there'd be no plot. And although he's not really evil, he does have an older brother who expected to inherit his dad's kingdom but didn't, possibly because of his beard...

Lang always loved world-building, and this world of pampered aristocrats living in magnificent palaces built on top of dismal caves where less fortunate people are locked up and left to rot simply because they spoil the view, and whether you live or die is decided by a huge weird-looking idol, is obviously the nearest he could get to revisiting Metropolis on a much lower budget, though unfortunately Debra Paget doesn't have an evil sexy robot twin. Not that she needs one; considering the year this movie was made, her extremely scantily-clad dance number involving a hilariously fake snake really does have to be seen to be believed!

Unfortunately, Lang's so busy showing us all the wonders he can afford, including a considerable amount of location shooting in real Indian palaces (one of which later featured in "Octopussy"), that the story sometimes gets forgotten about, especially in the first film, which wasn't intended as a stand-alone feature and devotes most of its running-time to setting up things that will happen in part two. And even while everything's being hastily wrapped up at the end, half the cast spend quite a while wandering around in tunnels failing to accomplish very much because they've literally lost the plot. It's a ramshackle muddle that meanders all over the place, and some of the acting is less than brilliant, but it looks great, and Fritz Lang is clearly having fun. For which I don't think anyone would blame him. It's not a great film or even a particularly good one, but, like a lot of movies made for no reason except that somebody really wanted to, it's got that personal touch, and that makes it both likeable and, despite its serious flaws, extremely watchable. By the way, if you hate subtitles, there's optional English dubbing.

This bizarre, unflinching, and occasionally self-indulgent movie has its faults, but it's still an extraordinarily honest depiction of what it's like to live according to the two sacred principles of American society, greed and hedonism, when you're pretty close to the bottom of the pile and clinging on with your fingernails to avoid falling off it altogether. Filmed in a curious style which nearly qualifies it as an extremely early found footage movie, it often looks as though the characters are being followed by a TV journalist who constantly thrusts the camera into their faces as if hoping they'll say something quotable, but since this particular paparazzo is apparently invisible, they never do. This attempt to make the movie seem less like a polished Hollywood product and more like real life is its biggest flaw, since at times it's badly overdone, and can be confusing in scenes where we're shown closeups of faces when we could do with seeing the whole room because something's happening off-camera.

Thematically it's just as atypical, being a completely non-judgemental portrait of an extremely imperfect man trying to earn a dubious living on the surface of a quagmire of money and lust, and getting sucked down by predators who make him look like Snow White. Ben Gazzara is perfectly cast as Cosmo Vittelli, the owner of a third-rate strip-joint hosting what has to be the worst cabaret ever captured on film, starring a living embodiment of irony called Mister Sophistication. Sleazy though Cosmo undoubtedly is, in a strange way we come to like him as we get to know him and the other lowlifes in his circle. These people genuinely care about each other, and although the Crazy Horse West may be a tacky dive with a terrible floor-show, they're doing the best they can, and they take pride in it because it may not be much, but at least it's something.

Martin Scorsese's ground-breaking "Mean Streets" was made three years before this film and was obviously a huge influence on it. The difference is that Scorsese's antiheroes are bullies who make their money by hurting people, whereas this movie is about the people they hurt. On one level it's gloomy and nihilistic, since Cosmo spends most of the film trapped in an increasingly awful situation, the nature of which won't come as a surprise because there's rather a big clue in the title. And yet it's oddly life-affirming too. Cosmo's downfall is indirectly caused by his indifference to money. It's useful stuff to have when he needs it, but in the end all he truly wants is to run a club where everyone has a good time. And however seedy and disreputable that club is, it's Paradise compared to the world inhabited by his tormentors, who value money more than life so long as the life isn't their own, but can't remember how to have fun or what friends are.

Technical note: this movie is advertised as being a two-disc set comprising the original cut and a shortened version. I only ordered disc 1, but I found it contained both cuts of the film. If disc 2 exists, I have no idea what's on it.

Shot in the dying days of Roger Corman's New World Studios and produced by Corman himself, throughout this desperately cynical attempt to squeeze the last drops of box-office mojo from the withered husk of sixties exploitation cinema you can practically hear the bottom of the barrel being scraped. So naturally that person who thinks "classic" means "every film ever made that I can't think of a word for right this second" has labeled it "classics action", a description roughly as helpful as "car chase shoelace fnibbit bazonka", and a lot less accurate than "worthless garbage." Although the extremely misleading synopsis on the main page, presumably quoted straight from the DVD cover, makes it sound like a tough gangster film along the lines of Corman's "Bloody Mama" from four years earlier, stylistically it's somewhere between Russ Meyer and Benny Hill, minus everything that's entertaining about either of them, but with a few bloody shootouts that clash horribly with the wearily wacky bedroom antics and tired smuttiness which make up the vast bulk of the movie, but could be edited into a trailer implying it was all-action, as opposed to nearly all borderline soft porn because that's a lot cheaper to film.

I almost didn't watch it all the way through, but I had nothing better to do for a couple of hours and I was mildly curious to see what part William Shatner was going to play. By the time he finally showed up the film was half over so I thought I might as well watch the rest of it. Yes, it's that thrilling! Angie Dickinson overacts but doesn't look happy as the feisty redneck title character, who, along with her two dim-witted and oversexed teenage daughters who look happier than she does but can't act, becomes a bank-robber for no particular reason. They take their clothes off. Other people show up. They take their clothes off too. Everyone has carefully-posed non-explicit sex, including Angie Dickinson and Willian Shatner, in a scene which I understand is responsible for this movie being "legendary". Well, if that's all you're interested in, it's about two minutes long and you can presumably find it on youtube, sparing yourself an hour and a half of tedium.

Seriously, this is the pits! The constant naughtiness is too lukewarm to be as outrageous as it thinks it is and just gets in the way. Well, it would if there was a story for it to get in the way of, but there isn't really, except for the kidnap plot which suddenly pops up 15 minutes before the end. The jokes don't work because they aren't funny, ever. The almost non-stop annoying "yee-haw, ain't y'all havin' a good time?" banjo and jew's harp music keeps playing while people are being bloodily gunned down as if they couldn't be bothered to change the record. And to round out your evening's entertainment with a touch of eyestrain, this is such a low-quality video-to-DVD transfer that most of it's ever so slightly out of focus. By this point in his career Roger Corman simply didn't care, and neither should you.

Colonel Percy Fawcett was a curious man, and there's a good film to be made about him. Unfortunately this isn't it. Movies about real people are always difficult for Hollywood to shoehorn into its mould because very few of us manage to wrap up our stories with neat Hollywood endings. Fawcett devoted a large part of his adult life to perilously hacking through disease-ridden jungles in search of a lost city so legendary it didn't even have a name. Of course, this being a true story, he never found it because it didn't exist, and eventually his luck ran out and his obsession killed him. As a character study of a weird, mystically inclined, incredibly stubborn man whose own books, with their bizarre accounts of giant spiders and 60-foot snakes, seem to show that for him the border between fact and fantasy was always a little blurred, and with a wildly imaginative director like Terry Gilliam at the helm, this could have been an excellent movie.

Instead, the inevitable tampering with history happens in all the wrong places. Fawcett's character flaws and even his eccentricities are whitewashed away, and he becomes a passionate crusader for 21st. century right-on political correctness, spouting clichéd holier-than-thou anti-racist sermons in Edwardian England. His motive for abandoning his family to risk his life in search of a city so imaginary it's near-as-dammit called Oz is to show Europeans that their brown-skinned brothers are in no way inferior to white men, because if he can prove that so-called savages built a really impressive stone city in South America, racism will disappear overnight. Just like it did when the Inca and Aztec Empires were discovered by the Spanish conquistadors 400 years previously.

Deleting most of what makes Fawcett interesting to turn a selfish fantasist looking for something as real as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow into a more conventional hero doesn't solve the problem that in reality, Fawcett died trying to reach a non-existent place because he was too stubborn and egotistical to admit he'd been on a fool's errand all along. So the script has to wriggle out of it by heavily implying Z was real, and Fawcett would have found it had his noble quest not been sabotaged by an entirely fictitious character who is as clumsily boo-hiss politically incorrect and rotten as Fawcett is saintly, which briefly provides the nearest thing the story has to an actual plot. And the desperate attempt to avoid ending the film on a downer without telling complete lies is truly groan-inducing. Obscure C-list director James Gray isn't awful, he's simply workmanlike in a boring TV movie kind of way. Given such thin material to work with, Charlie Hunnam would have to be a truly superb actor to make Fawcett interesting, and he isn't. Sienna Miller's a lot better, but as the wife who gets left at home and therefore never does anything the slightest bit exciting, she ends up spouting PC feminism so predictable she even does the "how can men say women are weak when we have to bear the pain of childbirth?" rant.

This film obviously means well, but it takes a completely misguided approach to the true story of a Quixotic fool. As an "adventure" the goal of which is never accomplished and never could have been, it fails to thrill. Technically it's adequate at best, and in places the sound is very poor (oddly, the sound editor seems to have had more trouble recording audible dialogue on a studio set than in the middle of a rain-forest). And nobody likes being preached at. I'm giving it more than one star because at least it's not cynical, and all concerned are clearly doing their best. Unfortunately it's nowhere near good enough.

This very early Stanley Kubrick film is both a foretaste of things to come, and a very modest B-movie with the faults you'd expect from a good but inexperienced director working on a tiny budget. Like almost all his films, instead of having a conventional hero it centres around very flawed people who, even if they eventually do the right thing, need an awful lot of persuading, often by way of cruelly random twists of fate. The main characters aren't particularly nice people, but they're a lot nicer than the B-list crime-boss they work for, who of course forgets that even if you have the money and the hired muscle to treat your unfortunate employees like slaves, you can only push them so far before they turn on you, and that can get very nasty if the people you pushed too far happen to be trained to fight. Which is pretty much the entire plot of "Spartacus", and a major theme in quite a few of Kubrick's other films.

However, "Spartacus Begins" this ain't. The male and female leads were so unfamiliar to me that I looked them up, and both of them only appeared in one other cinematic feature and a few TV episodes, this being their moment of glory. Jamie Smith was presumably cast for his physique rather than his acting skills, and he's adequate at best. Irene Kane likewise looks the part, but she can't really do powerful emotions and mostly seems a bit stunned. Which is a pity, because as two people who, in different but not so very different ways, are treated like meat by their slimy boss before being driven to desperate defiance, they've got a lot of acting to do.

Even if the acting isn't great, the characters are less clichéd than you might expect, both of them being realistically afraid to risk their lives even for people they care about a lot. And the boxing match reveals a true master at work. If you pay close attention, you'll see that by showing us the fight from the chaotic perspective of the dazed and battered boxer who ends up losing, Kubrick's getting around the fact that his budget doesn't run to all the stunt-work and retakes a proper full-on boxing-match would require, and there are almost no shots in which we clearly see one actor swinging a potentially dangerous punch at the other. But we still feel that we're watching a real, punishingly brutal, totally unglamorous fight.

Compared with this sequence, the equally famous showdown is a bit of an anticlimax, and gives a prophetic foretaste of the flaws in some of Kubrick's later films. We've seen dance-hall girls who are only one small step up from prostitutes going about their business. Setting the showdown between hero and villain in a mannequin factory where, by sheer chance, they fight surrounded by passively sexualised "women" who are literally mindless objects, and even tear off parts of their bodies to use as weapons, is an early example of Kubrick grabbing hold of a good bit of symbolism and being unable to let go. Sometimes his visual excesses worked superbly, and sometimes they were just excessive, as they are in this fight, which goes on too long and overuses its simple gimmick to the point where it gets a bit silly. It's in no way a major film, but it's an important minor one that shows a master learning the tools of his trade.

I'm amused to see that the person who rattles off these frequently inaccurate and spoiler-filled synopses copied this one so carelessly that he or she thinks there's a character in the film called "Officer Lothario"! You may also have noticed this film is described as "one of the best murder mysteries" made by a director far better known for his work in other genres who only shot a handful of films you could honestly describe as mysteries about murder, and we're told how little time and money were spent making it. Not much of a sales pitch, is it?

Unfortunately it's accurate, because this isn't much of a film. It's not terrible. If this site allowed reviewers to neither like nor dislike a movie I'd give it two and a half stars, and if it was by some second-rate hack I'd give him three for the moments of genuine artistry. But its director was Fritz Lang, an actual genius, and irrespective of how low the budget was, if this was the best he could do he wasn't really trying, and fans of his truly great work will be sadly disappointed.

If you're familiar with the conventions of cinema in general and the very strict self-imposed morality Hollywood forced all its directors to conform to in the early fifties, you won't find this film much of a mystery either, but to avoid spoilers for viewers who might not know the Hays Code's rules about murder I'll say no more. Besides, that's a minor objection compared to this movie's main problems. The tone is horribly uneven, juxtaposing the tormented heroine's anguish over the murder she may or may not have committed but certainly thinks she has with the antics of her two flatmates who think they're in a comedy, one of whom in particular is a waste of space we're supposed to find amusing because she's a shallow idiot with one and a half personality traits. Attempted rape is preceded by an overlong and badly-acted drunk scene that's mostly played for laughs. And although it's a pleasant enough ballad, you may get a little tired of Nat King Cole's "Blue Gardenia" song before the end. It's so overused that, in the film's best and subtlest joke, a plot-related excuse is found for one character to literally jump out of his seat in amazement when a different piece of music starts playing.

But the film's worst failing is how watered-down and lightweight it is compared to other Fritz Lang movies with similar themes. You can see what he's trying to do by making the story primarily about the inner turmoil of a woman who has (maybe) committed a murder rather than the cops trying to catch the killer, but you know what? Lang did the same thing a thousand times better in "M", the main character of which is a madman tortured by self-loathing who compulsively murders children. And he made that way back in 1931. The person who comes out of this half-hearted film with the most credit is Nat King Cole. His job is to sing a song, and he does it to the best of his ability. As for Fritz Lang, he later admitted that he didn't particularly care about this movie and only did it for the money. I believe him.

The opening titles inform us that the restoration of this print was partly paid for by Martin Scorsese, and you can see why he cared enough to do it, because this short and unassuming B-movie is a minor masterpiece, and its influence on some of Scorsese's best-known films is obvious. Ignore the synopsis on the main page, which conveys no sense at all of what this film is about, and describes events of minor importance which occur a very long way in. This is the story of a selfish, almost amoral anti-hero who is delighted to help very bad men illegally become rich if it'll make him rich too, so long as the bad things they do are low-key enough for him to turn a blind eye to them, but who eventually catches on the hard way that there's a very big difference indeed between not being good and being downright evil.

John Garfield, given the difficult job of making us care about an extremely unpleasant man, manages it superbly, only faltering in a scene where he has to act drunk, something actors should never try to do because so few of them can. Interestingly, although he falls for an impossibly good woman because this type of man in this type of film always does, that inevitable romantic subplot is barely relevant, and the driving force behind the gradual and very reluctant transformation of the character is almost entirely the realistically complicated bond between him and his brother, a man who, like everyone in this movie, isn't perfect, but who tries to do the right thing, and whose relationship with his brother who doesn't even try is strained to breaking point.

The film's central theme isn't good guys versus bad guys. Both brothers work for the same mob kingpin, the main difference between them being how willingly they do it. As for the cops, they aren't in the movie enough to become real characters, and when they do show up, they don't act much like heroes, needlessly bullying insignificant underlings who haven't done anything truly wrong. What it's really about is compromise, and how far you're willing to take it. Several characters both major and minor find themselves being forcibly dragged over lines they'd made up their minds never to cross, and we see what it does to them. They don't always react in ways that serve their own best interests, and sometimes they make decisions that are downright insane, just like real people who have been pushed too far often do, though you seldom see it in movies, especially ones this old. If there's a moral, it's that everyone's a bit of a hypocrite, but you're only evil if your willingness to profit at other peoples' expense has no limits at all.

As gangster films go, this one has exceptionally little action. The bad guys are trying to go legitimate because they don't care how they get their money so long as they get it, and if they can get it without risking going to jail, so much the better, thus even the distinction between legal and illegal profiteering is blurred, and the main character is a lawyer with only one very dubious but very rich client, so most of the weapons used are words rather than guns. But as a character-study of people who are to varying degrees good and bad but are all caught up in a situation which is very bad indeed, it deserves recognition as a primitive half-formed ancestor of true classics like "The Godfather".

I'm not sure if "spellbinding" is an appropriate word to use about a play which takes place almost as far from Wonderland or Hogwarts as it's possible to go, namely in the junk-filled attic of a semi-derelict house in Chiswick, and one-third of whose tiny cast is a tramp with a foul personality and even worse failings in the personal hygiene department! Though of course it does have dialogue by Harold Pinter, so practically every line is wickedly barbed, often at both ends.

Donald Pleasance is horribly convincing as Davies, the pathetic but utterly unlikeable homeless man given a roof over his head by Robert Shaw's kindly yet slightly disturbing Aston. Although third-billed out of the three people in this film who get any lines at all, Shaw, who ended up being typecast as early seventies hard men and will forever be remembered as the absurdly macho shark-hunter in "Jaws", is absolutely perfect, stealing the show as a gentle, quiet man who you know from the start isn't quite right. And when, in by far the most moving scene, he reveals why that is, even Davies gets the message and goes quiet for a bit.

The very loose plot concerns one of those situations we've all encountered, and perhaps even been in, where two people are stuck in a relationship gone horribly wrong, and a third person who somehow got dragged in ends up taking all the punches the other two can't quite bring themselves to land on each other. Each of the trio copes by having a symbolic objective which will allegedly solve everything, but which we know none of them will ever attain because they're fooling themselves, and maybe not even accomplishing that much. In the meantime, the ghastly Davies, who is both pitiful and impossible to pity, tries to ingratiate himself with whichever brother seems most likely to persuade the other not to throw him back onto the street because it's snowing out there. I don't need to tell you how well he succeeds.

This movie's strong points are the superb acting and Harold Pinter's razor-sharp screenplay, with the bonus of a young Nicholas Roeg behind the camera. Robert Shaw is particularly impressive, especially if you've only seen him playing tough guys in films like "Jaws" or "The Taking Of Pelham 123". On the downside, Donald Pleasance gives such a good performance that his character is genuinely unpleasant to be around, even though thankfully we can't smell him. And as the most intelligent and complex of the protagonists, Alan Bates' Mick only gets to show us what he's really like in subtle moments, which to be fair he handles very well. The rest of the time, the brittle façade of cruel wit he hides behind, and his relentless bullying of the bewildered Davies just because he's finally got somebody to take his frustration out on in such a way that some of it will get through to his brother, make him seem both very unpleasant and weirdly artificial, to a degree which is occasionally Pythonesque. There were moments when I almost expected him to ask Davies if his wife was a "goer".

So technically it's a five-star film, but two-thirds of the cast, who between them get about 90% of the dialogue, are so convincingly nasty that it's not exactly fun to watch, though fortunately Robert Shaw succeeds in making us care about somebody who in the hands of a lesser actor could have been just a slow-witted nonentity. For my money, Pinter's follow-up "The Servant", which is practically "Caretaker 2.0", and which was adapted for the screen the same year as this, is both a better play and works better as a movie. See also "The Birthday Party", directed by William Friedkin, starring Robert Shaw (again) and Harold Pinter, if you can find it, because unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available for rental from this company.