CAGE OF EVIL. United Artists, 1960. Ronald Foster, Pat Blair, Harp McGuire, John Maxwell, Preston Hanson, Helen Kleeb, plus uncredited: Eve Brent, Henry Darrow, Ted Knight. Director: Edward L. Cahn.
Mostly a play-it-by-the-numbers crime film, with a largely lackluster cast, cheap sets, and no more than workmanlike camera work and direction – all of the ingredients of a mediocre movie, in other words. And yet, in spite of all the odds against it, the movie did manage to keep me watching the whole way through, and these days of abandoning movies quickly on my part, that has to mean something.
Part of it may have to do with the fact that no matter how much star power the cast may have been lacking, they were all pros at the business they were in, which was telling a story both clearly and cleanly. In perhaps his only leading role in a film, Ronald Foster plays a police detective who keeps getting passed over for promotion, mostly for being very bad at the PR end of things. (He starts slugging possible witnesses when they don’t speak up right away.)
So it comes as no surprise when he’s assigned to get close to the girl friend (the rather statuesque Patricia Blair) of the hood who’s suspected of pulling off a jewel robbery, we already know one major route the story is going to take. Nor are we wrong.
Nor, of course, do things go well for the two of them, in true noir fashion. Even though you know what’s coming. what’s still a certain amount of fun is seeing it happen, and just how.
QUICKSAND. Overseas FilmGroup, 2003. Michael Keaton , Michael Caine, Judith Godreche, Rade Serbedzija. Director; John Mackenzie.
Even though I’m a big Michael Caine fan, I’d not heard of this movie until I spotted it on Amazon Prime Video this past weekend. That’s what having only a direct-to-video release will do to a movie, no matter who’s in it.
Not that Michael Caine has much of a role in it, but even so, it’s quite an enjoyable one, mixing the world of high finance with, what else, money laundering, this time through a film company that’s supposedly making a movie in the south of France. Michael Caine plays an on-the-skids movie star who’s there only as figure head to keep legitimate money coming in.
Michael Keaton plays the hard-nosed by-the-book head accountant back in the States when flags come up, suggesting something has gone wrong. Ad indeed it has. Once on the ground and investigating, he’s finds himself the victim of a frame-up, that of killing the head of the Nice police force.
Assisting him is the company’s CFO, played by Judith Godreche, whom I’ve never seen in a movie before, but who reminded me of a young French Julia Roberts. If I can I’ll see if I can’t watch her some of the other moviees she’s made.
Michael Keaton does OK in his role of our hero on the run, and if pressed, I’d say better than OK. His character seems to have resources you would not think a nerdish business-orieted kind of guy would have, given that he started the movie being portrayed as exactly that. Sometimes, though, characters are forced to grow in ability and what they can do when they have to, right before our eyes, and we the viewers fall for the gambit every time.
It is difficult to make such a movie as this and not make it fun to watch, and that is precisely what happens here. They don’t make a lot of movies like this any more, or if and when they do, how does one ever find out about them?
TIME TABLE. United Artists / Mark Stevens Productions, 1956. Mark Stevens, King Calder, Felicia Farr, Marianne Stewart, Wesley Addy, Alan Reed, Jack Klugman, John Marley. Director: Mark Stevens.
The first third of this small-time heist film is all very much routine. A train is robbed of a large payroll in cash, and assigned to the case are a insurance investigator (Mark Stevens) and a railroad detective (King Calder). They have worked well together before, and except for one thing, this one shows no sign of being different. This case and except for the stilted language this one does not have, the way they approach could have just as well have been dramatized on Dragnet.
That one thing, though, has them stumped. The theft was carried out is such meticulous detail, they can find nothing to get hold. In terms of cracking the case, they soon discover they have completely run out of leads. But as both you and I know, no heist in either a book or a movie can be carried out without something that goes wrong. And when that crack first occurs, then everything else starts to fall into place — for the pursuers, I mean.
There is also one big surprise along the way, and if you ever plan to see this film, I may have said too much already. Since I do not wish to give too much away, suffice it to say that the last two-thirds of the movie play out in s much more noirish vein, with plenty of dark streets, dingy Mexican cafes and gunfire.
Surprisingly, though, while the performance of rest of the cast is a solid notch better than just OK, actor-director Mark Stevens is almost as stiff as Jack Webb ever was in all those TV shows he was on. (The key word, though, and saving grace, is “almost.”)
THE ASSASSIN NEXT DOOR. Israel, 2009. Original title: Kirot (Hebrew: קירות‎; literally “Walls”). Olga Kurylenko (Galia), Ninet Tayeb (Eleanor), Vladimir Friedman, Liron Levo, Shalom Micahelashvili, Zohar Strauss. Written and directed by Danny Lerner.
As you watch this film, it will at times have you both frustrated and enraptured, but thankfully not at the same time. It is also, fatally flawed, especially at the very end, at which point a bloody shootout takes place at an Israeli airport, and not a single security office ever shows up. In Israel? At an airport? I think not.
Mitigating that is the fact that the film is wonderfully acted and beautifully photographed, and the story will suck you right in, in spite of its flaws.
I am, of course, ahead of myself. Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace) plays Galia, a immigrant to Israel from Ukraine who has gotten herself trapped in the sex trade by a Russian mobster. See a certain potential in her — she is superbly slim and athletic — he “recruits” her as an assassin, a sideline she hates, but without her passport and money, she has no choice.
Living next door to her are a married couple, but not happily. He abuses her almost every night, and Galia cannot help but notice. Thin walls keep her up most of the night. She slowly and hesitantly befriends the wife, a young woman named Eleanor, played to perfection by Ninet Tayeb as the model of a woman who cannot help but blame herself for her husband’s failures.
You may think you know where this is going — I certainly did — but I was wrong and you may be too. There is a lot of violence in his movie, and as I said up above, especially at the end. The fantasy aspect of the final scene is overshadowed, however, by the amount of tension that is released.
But when it comes down to it, it is the friendship between the two women, both in extremely dangerous situations, that will stick with you later, well after the movie is over. Overall? Flawed but fascinating.
Best line? “You hold gun like little girl. Hold gun like woman.”
THE LAST HIT MAN. Direct to video, 2008. Joe Mantegna, Elizabeth Whitmere, Romano Orzari, Michael Majeski, Victoria Snow. Written and directed by Christopher Warre Smets.
As I’m sure you could easily tell from the title without my telling you, The Last Hit Man is rated “R” for lots of gun-related violence, but if that isn’tanything that would stop you, if the movie is otherwise well done, here’s a movie I can recommend to you, and highly at that.
Joe Mantegna is perfectly cast as Harry Tremayne, the titular hit man, a fellow getting up in years after a long career of never failing on an assignment. Until, that is, he does. Not only does he begin to be filled with self doubt — is his body stating to fail him? — he realizes that the person who hired him is going to start wondering if it’s possible Harry has changed sides.
So Harry is ready when someone else comes gunning for him. Someone who fails. And whom Harry then hires to .. Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you, but it’s a neat twist (and even with as little of a hint that I can give you, you probably already know what I’m not telling you).
That’s the outer story. What I haven’t told you yet is that Harry has a partner. His young twenty-something daughter, Racquel, who is his electronics expert as well as his getaway driver. And more: she has a boy friend, an earnest young man who has no idea what the family business is that he just might be marrying into.
There is a lot of humor in this story, but it’s definitely understated — the kind that makes you smile rather than laugh out loud — and so you should definitely not take what I say to mean that The Last Hit Man is a comedy. It is not. It is rather a personal and down-to-earth family drama, and there is more to the story that I am definitely not telling you, and this time I mean it.
—
[Added later.] I was so impressed by Joe Mantegna’s performance in this film, I went looking for his resume. I knew he’d taken over for Robert Urich in two or three made-for-TV Spenser movies, and he was in several very good David Mamet films, but of his other work, not much else. It turns out that he’s had a substantial role in most of the fifteen year run that Criminal Minds recently closed up shop on.
Fifteen years? I’ve never watched it. Barely heard of it. Thought of it as a psychopath and/or serial killer of week kind of show. Psychopaths and/or serial killers don’t interest me. Is/was it more that? It would it seem to have to have been, for a TV series to be on that long.
VILLAIN. MGM, UK/US, 1971. Richard Burton, Ian McShane, Nigel Davenport, Donald Sinden, Fiona Lewis. Based on the novel The Burden of Proof by James Barlow. Director: Michael Tuchner
Some might find Villain a bit slow. A little too talky. And in some ways, they’d be right. For a gangster movie, Villain does have more than its fair share of quiet moments or social situations in which the main characters are just sitting around talking to one another. But it all has an ultimate purpose; namely, developing a great anti-hero in the form of East End gangster Vic Dakin (Richard Burton).
Burton portrays Dakin as a man torn between his sociopathy and his tenderness. On the one hand, he’s a gentle soul, a caregiver for his aging mother. On the other, he’s a ruthless scoundrel, ever desperate to remain atop the pecking order. Burton disappears into the role, showcasing his talent as one of the finest British actors of his generation. And with that Welsh accent of his, he really stands out. Dakin is a character that you won’t soon forget.
Speaking of unforgettable characters, there’s also Dakin’s underling, Wolfe Lissner (Ian McShane). Lissner is a colorful character, far less violent than Dakin and more self-aware. He’s the guy you go to for illicit things: women, men, drugs, whatever. In the movie, his Jewishness gets mentioned more than once. I am wondering whether in the book this was more fully fleshed out. But he seems to represent those hard-edged Yiddish-speaking gangsters of yesteryear; one suspects that his character was likely based on someone in particular or developed as a composite.
The story? Well, without giving away too much of the plot, let’s just say that Villain is both a character study and a cat-and-mouse police procedural, with a London police inspector close on Dakin’s trail, particularly after a robbery goes awry.
But it’s not really the plot that drives the film so much as Burton’s presence – his very physicality – and the movie’s seedy, criminal, and cynical atmosphere. For if any movie is drenched in the atmosphere of economically stagnating early 1970s London, it is this one. Watching this movie, one feels not just the dampness and the chilly wind on a sunny day in Brighton, but also the general state of the country. Uncertain, plodding along, wishing for better times.
That’s where Dakin comes in. He’s not an angry young man. He’s a furious middle-aged man. One who has made the decision that the only way to get ahead in a society that has offered him less than what he thinks he deserves to is to do it illicitly. He’s raw, tough as nails, filled with pride and bluster, and ultimately the victim of his own hubris and propensity toward brutal violence.
10 RILLINGTON PLACE. Columbia Pictures, UK/US, 1971. Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson, John Hurt, Pat Heywood, Isobel Black. Director: Richard Fleischer.
For a serial killer movie, Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place is rather subdued. There’s comparatively little screen-time violence and there is almost no blood or gore. What there is, however, is psychological violence of the worst kind.
Richard Attenborough gives a chilling performance as psycho-sexual deviant John Christie, a real-life criminal responsible for the strangulation murders of numerous women in late 1940s and early 1950s. He’s an everyman, struggling to survive in post-war London, and operates under the radar. Nobody, except perhaps his long-suffering wife, seems to suspect that there might be anything amiss in the building that Christie lets out for renters.
Enter a working-class married couple with a young infant daughter. Timothy Evans (John Hurt) and his wife, Beryl (Judy Geeson) are just trying to make ends meet. He drinks. She stays home. They fight. But overall, it’s a decent marriage. Until Christie decides that he is going to make Beryl his next victim. In a dastardly act of manipulation, Christie finds a most shocking way to get Beryl alone and vulnerable, before proceeding to strangle her to death.
What comes next is even more unnerving. Realizing that Evans is a simple illiterate with few friends, Christie manipulates him into leaving town, telling him that Beryl died accidentally. Evans, doe-eyed and unaware of the evil enveloping him, complies and seals his fate. Eventually, he is arrested for the murder of his wife and is hanged by the authorities for it.
Attenborough disappears entirely into the role. His Christie is less salacious than Anthony Hopkins’ scenery-chewing (pun intended) Hannibal Lecter, but perhaps even more vicious. Apparently, Attenborough took the role of Christie in significant part because of the film’s implicit anti-death penalty stance. Evans, after all, was truly an innocent man, a victim of both Christie and a judicial system unable to look past his social origins and lack of intelligence.
As you might have suspected, 10 Rillington Place is an undoubtedly bleak film, largely bereft of daylight, either in the literal or metaphorical sense. Everyone lives in a fog of despair and depression. This was, after all, the age of austerity. Britain was trying to get back on its feet after the Second World War and the subsequent loss of empire.
There was massive social dislocation in postwar London, with many persons left without families, spouses, or social support systems. Christie, the film implies, seems to have taken advantage of the weak, the lonely, and the trusting in the worst possible way. Fortunately, he eventually did get caught and face justice. But not before shocking many middle-class Britons with his horrendous crimes.
Fleischer is a talented director who worked in many genres over a long career in Hollywood. Some may consider him an auteur. Others, most certainly would not and feel that he was skilled journeymen, who adapted with the times and reinvented himself as his career required. Whatever the case, his direction here is steady and immersive. He certainly gets the most out of his actors. This is particularly true for Attenborough and Hurt, whose professionalism lends the film its necessary gravitas. Indeed, there’s nothing particularly exploitative here.
On the contrary, it’s perhaps too antiseptic, distant even, at times. A movie happy to show you what happened, without trying to overly capitalize on your emotional response. In fact, there’s not much – if any – music or overly intrusive ambient noise in the film. What we have instead is a quiet, claustrophobic world manipulated by a sociopath who learned how to lie and to manipulate his way into far too many lives.
The film is able to make you feel this intellectually, even more than emotionally. It’s a different kind of serial killer film. One that persons who usually don’t like that particular subgenre of crime film might find worth a look.
KING OF GAMBLERS. Paramount Pictures, 1937. Claire Trevor, Lloyd Nolan, Akim Tamiroff, Larry Crabbe. Helen Burgess, Barlowe Borland. Based on an unknown story by Tiffany Thayer. Director: Robert Florey.
You’d have to call this a gangster movie, but most of the overt gangster-like violence takes place in the first eight minutes, as bomb goes off in a barber shop whose owner is balking at stocking the latest model slot machines. Two young children are killed, and gambler, suave night club owner, and mob boss Steve Kalkas (Akim Tamiroff) is beginning to feel the heat.
To which he has an immediate answer. He’s a hands-on sort of mob boss, and there is a reason he always keeps a gun in his office desk drawer.
But no. What the movie really is is a three-way romance between Kalkos, a night club singer named Dixie Moore (Claire Trevor), and a newspaper reporter by the name of Jim Adams (Lloyd Nolan). Dixie is blissfully unaware of Kalkos’s true attentions to her, but Adams is not quite so slow in catching on.
It’s too bad that Lloyd Nolan’s character is out of town for much of the middle part of the book, or their love affair might have been consummated a lot sooner, as well as Kalkos’s final fate.
I’m in line second to none when it comes to watching a movie with either Claire Trevor or Lloyd Nolan in it, but in my opinion, Akim Tamiroff walks off with the high acting honors in his one. He’s both unctuously outgoing when he wants to be, but that’s on the outside. Inside, whenever he needs to be, he can also be as viciously cruel as any other crime boss in town.
This seems to be a movie that’s until recently has been hard to find. [See Comment #1.] Luckily someone did, and someone, that person or someone else, has put it up on YouTube. Enjoy this one while you can.
PS. Larry Crabbe is also in this one, without the Buster, and boy, in a tuxedo and sporting a nifty mustache, does he make a great right hand man for Mr. Tamiroff. Who would have thought?
UNCUT GEMS. A24, 2019. Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, The Weeknd, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Judd Hirsch, John Amos, Mike Francesa. Written & directed by Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie.
It is possible for an actor like Adam Sandler to be nominated for an Oscar? There’s talk about it, and if I weren’t totally out of the loop when it comes to Academy Awards (I have not had any interest in any of the films that have been nominated over the past several years, and I mean none), I’d say that the talk is entirely justified.
He should be nominated, in other words, but whether he will be is another matter altogether. In Uncut Gems he plays Howard Ratner, a sleazy but only semi-shady jewelry store owner in Manhattan’s midtown diamond district. Always sharply dressed with a smile on his face, he’s always in trouble with his bookies, for one thing, and constantly juggling his bets around to pay off another.
This a life that that not guarantee him a lot of friends. His marriage is crumbling, as much as he tries to save it, but having a mistress on the side does not help matters. His one hope, as the movie begins, is a rock he has managed to import from Ethopia containing what he thinks is a fortune in uncut gems. To this end, he attracts the attention of Boston Celtics basketball player Kevin Garnett (who very effectively plays himself) with whom Howard swaps the stone on a temporary basis for other’s NBA championship ring.
Things do not go well. Howard’s minor victories always seem to have a catch to them, and as sharp as he outwardly thinks he is, the losses keep piling up. Whether we would ever hang out with such a character — I’m speaking you and I — is doubtful, but if you can watch this movie without empathizing with him, you’re a better person than I, Sandler’s portrayal of him is well-nigh perfect.
You’ll have to judge the ending for yourself. I don’t think I was well enough prepared for it, and yet in retrospect, it’s also inevitable and fitting. Do be prepared for a non-stop torrent of F-words, and if you’re allergic to hand-held cameras you might want to stay away altogether.
But if you do, you’ll miss the performance of Adam Sandler’s career. He fits the role of a small grifter of a man whose luck always turns out bad, no matter how hard he tries, as if the part was written for him — and if it was, then all due credit to the Safdie brothers as well.
THREE CAME TO KILL. United Artists, 1960. Cameron Mitchell, John Lupton, Steve Brodie, Lyn Thomas. Director: Edward L. Cahn.
The benchmark for movies such as this — a family being held hostage by a gang of killers planning to assassinate some high government official — is probably Suddenly, the film released in 1954 in which Frank Sinatra’s target is the President of the US. [My review of that film can be found here.]
Even though that earlier film is much more well-known, I found myself enjoying this one a whole lot more. The target is the head of some small (fictitious) Middle-Eastern country who is about to fly out of the US from the Los Angeles airport> The reason this film is a lot more believable and suspenseful (if those two qualities are not one and the same) is that Cameron Mitchell and Steve Brodie look exactly like the kind of guys who might be hired could carry out such an assignment. Tough and professional all the way.
It goes without saying– doesn’t it? — that they do get tripped up, but their plan is a good one, and they do come awfully close to carrying it out. This is a low budget film, but it’s still an enjoyable one, with one caveat I can’t help but mention. Whoever had the final say on this film must have thought the viewership was going to consist of folks with movie IQ’s of less than 80. All the ever present voice-over narration managed to do is to repeat in detail what was plain as day to see on the screen.
