ROBIN HOOD, PRINCE OF THIEVES. Warner Brothers, 1991. Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Christian Slater, Alan Rickman, Geraldine McEwan, Michael McShane. Director: Kevin Reynolds.

   A lot of critics reviewed this film by dumping on Costner’s ego, just as they did with Brando twenty years ago, Welles twenty years before that, and D.W. Griffith twenty years before that. The few who paid any attention to the film itself carped about Costner’s accent — like, we go to Swashbuckler Movies for the Acting? — and delighted in making invidious comparisons with the Erroll Flynn version.

   Now I like the Flynn/Curtiz/DeHavilland/Keighly /Rathbone/Warner’s-Stock-Company Robin Hood a lot. It’s great fun and very pretty to look at, but I have to say
that it lacks any sense of dramatic development, due largely to the fact that the Basil Rathbone never gets to do anything very interesting, so Robin Hood doesn’t encounter any really substantial peril until the last few minutes, when Rathbone proves a worthy but out-classed opponent.

   The result is that Erroll Flynn, sexy as he is, comes off like a Hero in a Plastic Bubble and the film itself fails to generate much tension.

   The Costner Robin Hood, by contrast, offers some very substantial Heavies indeed, including a delightful Alan Rickman as the Sheriff, a slimy Guy of Gisbourne, a bona-fide Witch, and a pack of berserker Celts swarming atmospherically through the woods, jumping, screaming and generally having a hell of a time.

   The baddies in this one have so much fun, in fact, that what with Robin Hood having to be in it too, the whole thing gets to be just a trifle too long [143 minutes; 155 minutes, extended version]. Still, it’s a very nicely-done bit of film, and I recommend it.

         

THE FIGHTING BLADE. Inspiration-First National, 1923. Richard Barthelmess, Dorothy Mackaill, Lee Baker, Morgan Wallace, Bradley Barker, Frederick Burton, Stuart Sage, Phil Tead, Walter Horton. Story: Beulah Marie Dix; scenario: Josephine Lovett; art director: Everett Shinn. Director: John S. Robertson. Shown at Cinecon 39, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2003.

   Barthelmess plays Karl Van Kerstenbroock, a Flemish soldier of fortune who joins Cromwell’s forces. Going undercover, he visits the home of the fiancé of Thomsine Mugrove (Mackaill) whose cowardly brother (Bradley Barker) had earlier fled a duel with Van Kerstenbroock. Musgrove risks her life to help Von Kerstenbroock and is rescued by him after he leads Cromwell’s forces to victory.

   Barthelmess is a somewhat unlikely action hero, but character development and conflict are not neglected in this film, handsomely designed by noted contemporary illustrator Everett Shinn. Barthelmess is moody and often diffident in his acting style, a striking contrast to the flamboyance of an Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.

   I liked the film, but Jim Goodrich found it lacking the brio he appreciates in a swashbuckler. (I hope that Jim won’t mind if I report that he referred to it, in passing, as a “swishbuckler.”)

      Dorothy Mackaill:

   I saw something the other day I never knew existed: An intelligent Kung-Fu Movie. After seeing his segment on the TV series The Incredibly Strange Film Show, I finally found a couple Jackie Chan films at a local video store and rented them.

   I should confess at the outset that I used to watch Kung-Fu movies on a semi-regular basis, and mildly enjoyed them, despite their almost total lack of competence, but if anyone had told me there existed martial arts films with wit and humor, I wouldn’t have believed them, particularly after watching the first four films mentioned here.

   Dragon Lord was only mildly disappointing, with long stretches of supposedly witty banter between Jackie Chan and his buddy, both of whom rather improbably play juveniles.

   As you might expect, whatever wit there may have been in the original dialogue got fumbled in translation. Also the pan-and-scan is woefully inadequate at times. There are a couple of imaginative action scenes, though, including one where Jackie sneaks across a roof while bad guys inside thrust spears up at him.

   In all, while this was nothing to write home about, it was not bad enough to keep me from watching other Jackie Chan movies.

   Master with Cracked Fingers seems to be an earlier film, and is completely routine Kung-Fu stuff. I wouldn’t show it to my dog, but it did remind me of a conundrum of the genre:

   In this and most other Kung-Fu flicks, there’s almost always a climactic battle with the hero or heroes fighting it out — sometimes two or three against one — with some aged character who looks like the Chinese equivalent of Lionel Barrymore. Can any of you Orientalists out there tell me why it seems so particularly important and praiseworthy for Martial Artists to drub these old duffers?

   The Protector was a conscious attempt by Chan to break into the American market, and to this end Danny Aiello was hired to co-star. (Yeah, that’ll pack ’em in.)

   Unfortunately, the producers forgot to write a part for Aiello, so he spends the film standing around saying things like “You’re the boos, Jackie,” “Right behind you, Jackie,” and “Here it is, Jackie.”

   Jay Silverheels got better lines than that! The film itself is suffused with a modest sheen of competence, but the plot and characterization are so routine as to have been done by rote.

   Fantasy Mission Force, on the other hand, is almost bad enough to be good. It’s set in World War II. Everyone drives brightly-colored Suzuki Jeeps with roll bars, and one of the Generals wears a Civil War uniform, but it’s supposed to be WWII.

   The plot, such as it is, involves a super-Commando (not Jackie Chan) assigned to rescue four allied Generals kidnapped by Japanese Nazis(!) in Luxembourg, which, it turns out, has no cities but lots of dense jungle and bamboo huts.

   To this end, the Super-Grunt recruits a force of spectacularly incompetent outlaws in a variety of period costumes, and they all set out for wherever the Generals are being held.

   From this point on, the plot gets a little strange, as the World War II Commando Force encounters Cannibal Amazons, Ghosts, Punk Road Warriors in beat-up Ford Mustangs, and a wandering chicken thief played (about time!) by Jackie Chan.

   As I say, it’s almost bad enough to enjoy, but ultimately the lack of enthusiasm on the part of all concerned in its making sinks this one.

   So finally we get to Police Force (aka Jackie Chan’s Police Force, aka Police Story), which is quite simply an intelligent, imaginative Action Film, on a par with the best of the James Bond’s, or just about any French Thriller, with lots of visual gags and a couple of actual developed characters.

   Police Force also features some very imaginatively-staged action scenes, including the destruction of a hillside village by driving little cars through it, and the similar trashing of a multi-floor mega-mall in an extended fistfight.

   As for the Star himself, Jackie Chan emerges here as a sort of Asiatic Belmondo, complete with klutzy machismo, self-deprecating humor, and an insistence that all his action scenes be shot so as to show that he’s not using a stunt man.

   It’s a device that’s been used before, notably by such cinematic athletes as Doug Fairbanks and Fred Astaire, and it’s rather well suited to the straight Action Film. I had to wade through a lot of celluloid slop to get there, but Police Force was worth the trip.

● DRAGON LORD. Authority Films, 1982. Also released as Dragon Strike; original title: Long xiao ye. Starring, co-written by and directed by Jackie Chan.

● MASTER WITH CRACKED FINGERS. Soon Lee Films, 1971. Original title: Guang dong xiao lao hu. Jackie Chan, Siu Tien Yuen. Director: Mu Zhu.

● THE PROTECTOR. Golden Harvest Company, 1985. Jackie Chan, Danny Aiello, Sandy Alexander. Director: James Glickenhaus.

● FANTASY MISSION FORCE. Cheung Ming Films, 1982. Original title: Mi ni te gong dui. Jackie Chan, Brigitte Lin. Director: Yen-ping Chu.

● POLICE FORCE. Golden Way Films Ltd., 1985. Also released as Police Story. Original title: Ging chat goo si. Jackie Chan, Brigitte Lin. Director: Jackie Chan.

MYSTERIOUS DR. SATAN [and] THE DRUMS OF FU MANCHU. Both Republic, 1940. Serials: 15 chapters each. Directors: John English & William Witney.

   Back in Grade School I used to leaf eagerly through Famous Monsters and Screen Thrills Illustrated, tantalized by stills from old serials filled with costumed heroes, mad doctors, robots, and death rays, chock-full of perils to dazzle my pre-adolescent imagination.

   As I grew older, my tastes remained pretty much pre-adolescent, the serials became available on video, and I discovered most of them were about someone trying to conquer the world with two guys and a truck.

   That’s true of the later post-war serials, when everyone got a bit tired of it all, but Drums and Satan were made back when somebody cared about giving the kids a thrill, and each is fifteen chapters of constant action, delivered by the able directing team of William Whitney and John English, abetted by Republic’s hyper-kinetic stuntmen.

   We get car crashes, plane crashes, robot crashes, leaps from cliffs, daggers, pistols, trapdoors, gloating … everything, in short, that a kid dreams his world will be filled with when he grows up.

   The heroes of these things are your typical stalwart and two-fisted sort, but the eponymous baddies of these two efforts are memorable indeed. Doctor Satan (I guess some folks don’t care what they name their kids) is played by Eduardo Cianelli with the kind of dapper old-world charm you don’t see much in Mad Scientists anymore.

   Cianelli is remembered best as the evil religious fanatic (“Kill for the love of killing!”) in Gunga Din, but he was playing suave Gangsters ever since Winterset in 1936, and he wound down his career as an ancient medicine man in the surreally bloated Mackenna’s Gold.

   Fu Manchu, in Drums of… is a less showy part, written with stereotyped oriental reserve, but he’s played by Henry Brandon, who was probably the most notable movie villain you never heard of.

   Brandon started out in the movies (as Henry Kleinbach) hamming it up as evil Barnaby in Laurel & Hardy’s Babes in Toyland. Before Fu, he did dirty duty in serials like Buck Rogers and Jungle Jim, and afterwards served as the character model for Captain Hook in Disney’s cartoon Peter Pan, but his most critically respected effort is probably his few scenes as Chief Scar in John Ford’s The Searchers.

LAW OF THE JUNGLE. Monogram Pictures, 1942. Arline Judge, John King, Mantan Moreland, Arthur O’Connell, C. Montague Shaw, Guy Kingsford, Laurence Criner, Victor Kendall. Director: Jean Yarbrough.

   I didn’t begin watching this movie with high expectations, and after five minutes, I was ready to turn it off. I’d seen it all before, I thought, and far better done, and this assuming I wanted to see another girl-singer-stranded-in-the-African-outback movie again in the first place.

   But something caught my attention – maybe it was Arline Judge, a good-looking brunette with beautifully expressive eyes – or maybe it was Mantan Moreland, playing another comedy role in a low budget picture as “Jeff,” in this case the fellow heading up John King’s safari into the jungle looking for bones.

   Or maybe it was the only player in this movie who later on received two Oscar nominations, Arthur O’Connell, the grizzled, dissipated and thoroughly crooked owner of the traders’ bar where Arline Judge has been stranded without a passport, which O’Connell, unknowing to her, has in his possession.

   Palaeontologist John King, whom Arlene calls “Professor,” is her only lifeline out of Africa, as well as her means of escape from some Nazi-like fellows that O’Connell is in cahoots with.

   Which just about explains everything, including perhaps why I kept watching. And enjoying myself, especially the scene in the moonlight in the jungle with Arlene Judge’s head on John King’s shoulder, and he totally oblivious to her charms.

   In movies made by Monogram in their heyday, scientists were either mad, you see, or hopelessly naive. (John King’s acting is also as stiff as they come, but among other highlights of his career, he was one of the Range Busters in a series of early 40s B-westerns for Monogram after having the title role in the Ace Drummond serial in 1936.)

   There is also later on a guy dressed up in a gorilla suit, and Mantan Moreland learns not to say “Scrambola” to the head chief’s hefty-sized daughter when trying to persuade her to release him and the other two stars of this motion picture. Whenever Mr. Moreland is on the screen, this movie is a comedy. When he’s not, it’s a below average jungle adventure, but believe it or not, none the worse for it.

CAMPBELL’S KINGDOM. J. Arthur Rank, UK, 1957. Dirk Bogarde, Stanley Baker, Michael Craig, Barbara Murray, James Robertson Justice, Sid James. Based on the novel by Hammond Innes. Director: Ralph Thomas.

   I watched this movie about a week ago, without planning to write up any comments about it. Just too ordinary, I thought. But thinking about it again this afternoon, it occurred to me that calling a film ordinary is a review, of sorts. All I have to do is expand upon it, and so here I am.

   Not knowing enough about British film-making to say for sure, I don’t believe they ever went in for producing westerns. (Western novels are another matter. There are more westerns published in the UK today than there are in the US.) Campbell’s Kingdom is, I think, an exception. It takes place in Canada, though, somewhere in the western Rockies, so maybe it’s an almost-but-not-quite sort of exception.

   Either way, the star of the film, Dirk Bogarde is no Alan Ladd (the closest American equivalent I have come up with) but as Bruce Campbell, the sickly heir who’s comes from Britain to claim his property high up in the mountains, he’s entirely believable. His grandfather died convinced there was oil on the land, and despite plans by the locals to build a dam and flood the property in the process, Bogarde refuses to sell and knuckles down to build a well to prove his grandfather was right.

   Of course there also is crooked business at work, with the number one villain being Stanley Baker, the foreman of the dam building project, so while the plot may be predictable, the going is not easy.

   Bogarde does find a few allies, chief of whom is a girl (Barbara Murray), but with only a few months to live (his doctor’s assessment), romance seems to be all but out of the question.

   The color photography is wonderful, and some the hazards of working in the isolated wilderness are shown to great effect (the outdoors scenes were filmed in the Italian Alps). Back in 1957, some of the closing scenes must have been spectacular to see on the screen. But there’s no “oomph” in the plotting to make me want to tell you that you have to go out and buy the just released DVD of this movie.

   Obviously I remember enough of the film to tell you as much as I have here about the film, but my initial assessment remains the same. Ordinary, just ordinary.

THE WHIP HAND. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Carla Balenda, Elliott Reid, Edgar Barrier, Raymond Burr, Otto Waldis, Michael Steele, Lurene Tuttle, Peter Brocco. Director: William Cameron Menzies.

   Amid the general anonymity of reds-under-the beds cold-war movies, The Whip Hand comes as a pleasant surprise: a quirky, paranoid little film from a master of the form, William Cameron Menzies, whose Invaders from Mars (1953) set the standard for quirky paranoia.

   Actually Whip wasn’t supposed to be about the Red Menace; it started its weird little life as a movie about finding Hitler holed up in mid-west USA. But when Howard Hughes, then the head of RKO saw it, he said Hitler was last year’s boogie man and they should change the story to something about a Commie plot. Hence this pleasant trifle about sinister Russians infiltrating a small town to do experiments in mass murder.

   Given this bifurcated birth, one would expect The Whip Hand to turn out as some godawful mess along the lines of They Saved Hitler’s Brain, but actually it’s a pretty neat job, thanks mainly to the visual intensity imparted to it by Director Menzies, a stylist also responsible for the look of films like Things to Come, Thief of Bagdad and The Black Book.

   Menzies at his best has a way of exaggerating the look of ordinary things to evoke a slightly off-kilter feel, a sense that familiar things are somehow alien.

   Thus the typical small town into which vacationing reporter Elliott Reid stumbles seems filled from the outset with subtle menace, and the people he encounters always seem to be hiding something just off-screen.

   It all culminates in a nifty chase, a mad doctor’s lab, and a rattle of G-Man machine guns, but before we get there we’re treated to Raymond Burr at his nasty best.

   Playing a second-string bad guy, Burr offers a patently fake folksy air and a booming hearty laugh at the feeblest of jokes that’s somehow more chilling than anything his boss-heavies put out here. It’s just one more reason to enjoy a movie that should be better known.

LA BANDERA. Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie (SNC), France, 1935. Released in the US (1939) as Escape from Yesterday. Annabella, Jean Gabin, Robert Le Vigan, Raymond Aimos, Pierre Renoir, Gaston Modot, Margo Lion. Based on a novel by Pierre Dumarchais under the name of Pierre MacOrlan. Director: Julien Duvivier.

   There was a day last month that TCM showed Jean Gabin movies for 24 hours straight, and I taped about 16 hours’ worth. As I make my way through watching them, my comments will show up here. This is the first.

   I’ve not seen enough French films of this era for me to say anything clever or even intelligent about them in that regard. I’ll have to also refrain from saying anything about other films that Jean Gabin made, unfortunately, except to say that this one was early in his career, with both La grande illusion and Pépé le Moko not coming along until 1937, the two films that really cranked his career into high gear.

   He’s a man on the run in this one, having killed a man in France and finding himself broke in Spain in the very next scene. The Spanish Foreign Legion is his only option. He signs up, trying (as many men did) to forget his past and not to think (too much) about his future.

   He makes some friends, a couple of enemies, including one (he believes) is on his trail for the murder he committed. He also meets a Moroccan girl (Annabella), a dancer in what can only be called a dive, for where else is there for a legionnaire to go, away from the barracks and the day to day drudgery of a soldier’s life?

   The first half is slow going, with the quick transitions between scenes making it a bit of a challenge to follow the story, but once Gabin finds himself in one spot, somewhere in the African desert with all-but-invisible Arab enemies, the story settles down as well. To a tale of honor, of course, and manhood, and life in general as well as in particular.

   I will not tell you if the movie ends tragically or not, but either way, it is one of those films that could easily do so. But there are other reasons to watch this movie, other than the story. The film-making techniques, and what the director added to this film visually, for example, catch the eye and intrigue the mind more often as not, making this movie one I will probably watch again, perhaps even soon, for that very reason.

      YouTube clips:

(1) A man is killed.

(2) Gabin and Annabella meet for the first time.

(3) The finale.

SEARCH AND DESTROY. 1979. Perry King, Don Stroud, Tisa Farrow, George Kennedy, Tony Sheer, Jong Soo Park. Director: William Fruet.

   First Blood, the first Rambo movie, was made in 1982, and at the time, that was the earliest post-Vietnam War movie I remember seeing. Until this one, that is. I’m no expert on the genre, but since the war didn’t end until 1975, and no one was very much interested in seeing films about that particular military debacle, Search and Destroy may have been among the first.

   And despite a story line that doesn’t allow much room for digression, it’s a good one. It takes place in 1978, with members of a small platoon of Vietmam vets in the process of being hunted down and killed. It seems that the group was ambushed during one of their missions, and in the confusion of the attack and the haste of the retreat they left an Vietnamese advisor behind. To die, so they assumed, but — you’ve caught on already? — no indeed, he did not.

   Two of the still surviving vets (Perry King and Don Stroud) live in the Niagara Falls area, which makes a terrific background for the action film of retribution and revenge, both the falls themselves and the rather shabby town that’s been built up next to it. (I’m told most of the movie was filmed on the Canadian side, even though it’s meant to be the American, logically speaking.)

   George Kennedy, in his usual fine pugnacious form, plays the police chief whose job is to stop the violence and keep the general populace safe. (Good luck on both!) Tisa Farrow, King’s slim girl friend looked awfully familiar to me, but the bell didn’t ring until after the movie was over, when I read through the credits again, and her last name finally jumped out at me. Jon Soo Park, who has the assassin’s role, didn’t have any lines to say, as I recall, but he’s quite effective as the methodical, single-minded killer, well-trained in the martial arts and other deadly skills.

   But it’s only when the action moves to the background that the movie takes on any real purpose or meaning: about the buddies you make in wartime, the promises you make to each other, the highs that fighting a war without supervision can give you, and the lows that have to be overcome when you come home and try lead a normal life again.

   If there were a little more of this side of the story, and a little less of firepower and other pyrotechnics, as grand as they may be, I wouldn’t hesitate in calling this a noir film – at least neo-noir. It didn’t have much of a budget, and I’m sure it was all but unknown when it was first released, but if you’re into this kind of film, this is a good one.

VICTORY. Paramount, 1940. Fredric March, Betty Field, Cedric Hardwicke, Jerome Cowan, Sig Ruman, Margaret Wycherly, Fritz Feld. Screenplay: John L. Balderston , based on the novel by Joseph Conrad. Director: John Cromwell.

   I’ve been trying to see Victory since I read about it in 1968. For some reason, however, Paramount retired the film and in the intervening umpty-ump years I’ve never once seen it listed on television or in a movie catalogue. All things come, however, to he who has Internet, and last month I finally found a copy—a bit soft, and bleached out in a couple spots, but watchable.

   Victory is probably Conrad’s most-filmed novel, starting with a silent in 1919, (lushly directed by Maurice Tourneur, but somewhat over-balanced by Lon Chaney Sr as knife-wielding Ricardo) and ending, for now, with a 1995 film starring Willem Dafoe, featuring Rufus Sewell as Ricardo and Sam Neill as plain Mr. Jones — as nasty a pair of heavies as you could want — plus Irene Jacob as a poignant heroine.

   The 1940 film was adapted by John L. Balderston, whose credits range from Bride of Frankenstein to Prisoner of Zenda, who brought to the project sense enough to leave Conrad’s novel mostly intact. Direction came from John Cromwell, never a cinematic pioneer, but always able to do a thing up nicely — check out movies like Algiers, Dead Reckoning and The Enchanted Cottage to see what I mean.

   Cromwell fills Victory with steamy jungles, sweltering hotels and blistering thunderstorms, but his main focus is on the actors, with Fredric March his usual fine self, and Betty Field a remarkably lovely heroine.

   Field never achieved stardom, but she had major roles in important-looking pictures like Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby and King’s Row, and did very well by them—pperhaps she was too good an actress to be a star, but she trouped on to the end, finally trading insults with Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff. (1968.)

   The acting triumph in Victory, though, goes to Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Jerome Cowan as plain Mr. Jones and Martin Ricardo; I honestly never knew these two could act like this. Hardwicke, usually the stuffy patriarch, plays Jones like a cross between Oscar Wilde and Lee Van Cleef, his every gesture languid and deadly, casually referring to past murder and dismissing it with a bored, “Ah well, it’s a long story. Another time perhaps.”

   Even more surprising is Jerome Cowan, normally a rather uninspiring player, who comes on unshaven and cat-like, sporting a fine cockney accent and darting about the scenery as he pursues Betty Field with stylish lust. Given a chance to stretch a bit, Cowan and Hardwicke indulge themselves wonderfully, and together they make this a film to treasure and watch again.