Rent The Black Windmill (1974)

Tilting at windmills and missing completely - The Black Windmill review 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.

Weak Conspiracy Thriller - The Black Windmill review by GI

With its overcooked and unnecessarily complicated plot, pointless scenes and an anticlimactic ending this is a weak film in director Don Siegel's canon. This is his first film shot in Europe adapted by Siegel from an average pot-boiler novel. Michael Caine plays Tarrant, an MI6 agent (a character somewhere between his own Harry Palmer and a boring James Bond), who after attempting to infiltrate a subversive terrorist group finds his young son is kidnapped for ransom. His bosses suspect Tarrant is behind the whole thing and he has to unravel a convoluted conspiracy whilst trying to save his son. Of course there's a traitor in the mix and when it's finally revealed who it is you'll not care. It all adds up to a pointless story, which after awhile you'll begin to lose any interest in. There's a host of contemporary English character actors including Donald Pleasance as the MI6 boss with some weird personality traits, Joss Ackland, Clive Revill and others. John Vernon, a Siegel regular, is the nasty kidnapper who gets shot in the balls for his trouble! A critical and box office flop and I can see why.

Cracking - The Black Windmill review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Don Siegel’s cracking spy thriller has Caine as Tarrant a serving MI6 officer whose son David is kidnapped by Drabble (Vernon). He demands very specific ransom in diamonds which is the exact amount that Tarrant’s boss Harper (Pleasence) has only just purchased for operations so someone is working on the inside. Harper explains that they can’t pay up forcing Tarrant to take control and pretending on the phone to be Harper gets the bank to hand over the diamonds to him. To complicate things Drabble has set Tarrant up to it look like he is the one who set the whole thing up so he has to not only rescue his son but evade the authorities whilst exposing the real traitor. Caine is terrific as always with Suzman as his long suffering estranged wife with Pleasence as his fastidious boss and Vernon as his most velvety menacing. Some great action set pieces and great use of the central London locations with the human cost acting as a counterpoint to the murky machinations of the spy genre. One of my favorites - 4/5