BIRDS OF PREY. ABC, made for TV movie; first telecast: 30 January 1973. David Janssen, Ralph Meeker, Elayne Heilveil, Harry Klekas, Sam Dawson, James W. Gavin, Paul Grace, Wayne D. Wilkinson, Larry Peacey. Aerial supervisor: James W. Gavin; director: William A. Graham.

   The first and only time I saw Birds of Prey was thirty-seven years ago, and it blew me away. As action films go, I still think it’s superior to many; and the fact that it was made for television on a minimal budget makes it even more remarkable.

   David Janssen plays an ex-World War Two Flying Tigers fighter pilot whose aviation career is winding down; he’s now relegated to being a traffic reporter flying over Salt Lake City, and he’s quietly going nuts from boredom.

   One day he happens to observe a bank robbery in progress, which he duly reports to his good pal from the war (Ralph Meeker), who is now a police captain with the Salt Lake City PD. But Meeker doesn’t believe him at first, thinking it’s another one of Janssen’s middle-aged pranks.

   That’s all it takes: Janssen sees it as a challenge — and the chase is on. From this point forward, the film is indeed one giant chase sequence. The bad guys transfer themselves, their loot, and a hostage to a helicopter only to be relentlessly harried by Janssen every step of the way. The pacing is terrific.

   In addition to two good performances from Janssen (settling into his world-weary “Harry O” character) and Meeker, the helicopters are also the stars. This was long before CGI (computer-generated visual effects); when the choppers swoop under freeway overpasses with a foot or less separating the rotor blades from the concrete abutments, it’s the real thing.

   Another amazing sequence happens INSIDE an aircraft hanger, when Janssen corners the bad guys’ copter; this needs to be seen to be believed. The margin for error, with both copters swaying uncertainly in a Mexican standoff, has to be two or three inches at most.

   Kudos to the late James W. Gavin for these sequences. Whenever Hollywood needed a master pilot who could also deliver lines in an acceptable fashion, Gavin was their go-to guy. He did lots of screen work in films and TV series such as Adam 12.

   If you really get into the characters in this film — as I did — then the final line will be especially poignant: “Damn you, Walker! I didn’t ask you to do that!”

   Tech note: If I remember it correctly, Janssen’s chopper was a Hughes 500D, while the criminals had an Aerospatiale Alouette — but it has been almost four decades.

   Further note: Birds of Prey is available on video, but many customers complain that the Second World War-era Big Band music featured in the film’s network broadcast — music that is integral and meaningful to the two lead characters — has been replaced with something different, so be aware that you’re not getting the original film.

DAY OF WRATH. 2006. Christopher Lambert, Brian Blessed, Blanca Marsillach, Szonja Oroszlán, James Faulkner, Phillida Law. Written and directed by Adrian Rudomin.

    This has nothing to do with the classic Carl Theodor Dreyer film Der Vredens Tag (1943), but instead is a Hungarian production that’s set in Spain of 1542, fifty years into the Inquisition and its terrors.

   Taking place in a world of opulence and degradation and the excesses of religious zealotry, the film is supposedly based on a true story.

    Lambert plays Ruy de Mendoza, a minor noble, and the newly appointed sheriff of a Spanish province, who finds his life and that of his family at risk when he refuses to ignore a murder on his watch.

    Despite efforts by everyone, including the governor, Lord Francisco del Ruiz (Brian Blessed) to the head of the Inquisition Friar Anselmo (James Faulkner) to keep a conspiracy of silence, Mendoza pushes forward in his investigation.

    In the world of Spain during the Inquisition, birthright was everything, and the slightest taint of Jewish blood was a ticket to financial ruin, torture, and a heretic’s death by fire.

    As Mendoza delves into the mystery, he begins to uncover secrets he should not know and a conspiracy among the leader of the local Inquisition to extort money from noble families with the Jewish taint — including the newly appointed and vainglorious governor, but the truth is darker and more complex than mere religious persecution and zeal.

    A series of murders with the letters D R (for the Latin Day of Wrath) carved into the victims is related to these secrets, and massive keys left on the bodies are part of the answer.

    Finally Mendoza has to put his duty and his family against his blood and his honor in order to survive.

    This is an attractive film, and the story is fascinating, but the script is disjointed and despite some interesting touches (at one point Lambert uses an early form of ballistics to identify a bullet used in a murder), it doesn’t hold together.

    Day of Wrath is a decent time passer, a B movie at heart, with a few “A” touches in costuming and set decoration.

    There is a bit of nice swordplay, a hint of sex, and a masked killer in black and silver, but a better script and direction would have been more helpful in dealing with a conspiracy this complex and with problems this dark.

    The movie ends in a blood bath and a new conspiracy with Lambert’s Mendoza at its head, as it only could, but you have to wish a surer hand had been at the helm. Even with its flaws, there is a good idea here. It just lacks the skilled input needed to develop it fully.

    And I couldn’t help but think while watching it, it might have made a better novel than movie. A little structure would have been a major improvement.

    

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE. Mascot, 1935. [12-episode serial] Gene Autry … Gene Autry, Frankie Darro, Betsy King Ross, Dorothy Christy, Wheeler Oakman, Charles K. French, Warner Richmond, J. Frank Glendon, Smiley Burnette. Directors: Otto Brower & B. Reeves Eason.

   Viewing [and reviewing] Batman led on to The Phantom Empire, but I couldn’t start that till I read James Churchward’s 1931 opus The Lost Continent of Mu.

   Churchward’s book is non-fiction, of a sort, dealing with his discovery of ancient clay tablets in Burma telling of an advanced civilization somewhere to the East, which he compares to inscriptions from the Mayans and Aztecs locating the cradle of civilization somewhere to the West.

   He then takes similarities in oriental picture-writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics and pre-Columbian artifacts from the New World, and concludes that there must have been an advanced society somewhere in the Pacific that spread its culture over the world, then sank into the sea, which he calls Murania, or Mu for short.

   Well, I don’t know about you, but for me that’s kind of a stretch. Churchward spends the book supporting this theory, but I keep running into phrases like, “geologists are wrong…,” “Egyptologists are wrong…,” “archaegeologists are wrong…” till I wonder how he got a monopoly on Truth.

   And as his story gets more and more embroidered, with details about the advanced civilization, its people (Who, he insists, must have been white.) and the aftermath of its fall, this sounds less like Science and more like the ramblings of Siegel and Schuster.

   Closing the book, I had to wonder why anyone ever took it seriously in the first place, but apparently someone did, and still does, because the book and its sequels keep getting reprinted.

   All the reference books say The Phantom Empire was clearly based on Churchward’s work, but I couldn’t see it myself. Empire deals with Gene Autry’s efforts to save Radio Ranch from unscrupulous land-grabbers trying to get to a secret uranium deposit on the property, and the people of Lemuria who inhabit an advanced underground civilization (also called Mu for short) which can be reached only by an elevator which opens up somewhere near the uranium deposits on Radio Ranch.

   Yeah, it’s kind of Out There, particularly with Gene Autry constantly trying to escape from the bad guys in time to get back to the ranch and do his weekly mortgage-paying radio show, but I found it no harder to ingest than Churchward’s hoke, and considerably faster-moving.

   Mascot serials were never believable, but they were somehow always fun, and the underground kingdom, with its robots, death rays and sexy queen offer a lively time for anyone who can descend to their level. As for The Lost Continent of Mu, I have to say that for a book about an advanced civilization sinking into the sea, there are some awfully slow spots.

    

BATMAN. Columbia, 1943. [Fifteen-episode serial.] Lewis Wilson (Batman / Bruce Wayne), Douglas Croft (Robin / Richard ‘Dick’ Grayson), J. Carrol Naish, Shirley Patterson, William Austin (Alfred), Charles Middleton. Based on the DC Comic characters created by Bob Kane. Director: Lambert Hillyer.

   Lightning Warrior [the 1931 Rin Tin Tin serial reviewed here ] was a gift from a friend, and it led to me watching a spate of serials, a pleasure I seldom indulge in because of the time consumed.

   But shortly after this, I started on Batman (1943) which I hadn’t seen since a marathon evening back in 1965 when all 15 chapters were screened back-to-back, accompanied by witticisms hurled from the audience, for a campy event called An Evening With Batman And Robin.

   Back then, Batman seemed closely linked to the myriad spy spoofs of the period but forty-odd years (in every sense) later, it has acquired a certain charm of its own.

   The characters and their baroque machinations seem like brightly-painted toy soldiers marching about to the caprices of a wanton child, and all the fights, chases and explosions merely excuses for fun. Batman keeps starting fights he can’t finish, leading to This Week’s Cliff-Hanger, as the bad guys repeatedly beat him up, push him off a skyscraper, down an elevator shaft, from a cliff, under a speeding train or what-have-you.

   Lewis Wilson and Douglas Croft play the Dynamic Duo with admirably straight faces, and Charles Middleton livens up a few chapters as a colorful prospector, but J. Carroll Naish really steals the show with a hammy turn as the villainous Dr. Daka, complete with disintegrator ray, alligator pit, and an army of mindless zombies.

   Not much sense in it, but there’s lots of fun.

THE LIGHTNING WARRIOR. Mascot, 1931. [Twelve-episode serial.] Rin Tin Tin, Frankie Darro, George Brent, Pat O’Malley. Georgia Hale, Theodore Lorch, Yakima Canutt. Directors: Benjamin H. Kline, Armand Schaefer.

   It’s hard to credit these days, but ninety-some years ago, Rin-Tin-Tin was a big star in the silent movies. Respectable critics lauded his emotional range, and even today hardened cynics like Walter Albert get all teary-eyed at the sight of him.

   But that was in the Silent Movies. With the advent of the talkies, Rinty’s popularity diminished somewhat, and by the 1930s, with a couple of divorces behind him and a rumored dog-treat habit, he ended up doing serials at Mascot.

   Not that The Lightning Warrior (1931) is all bad. I mean, sure it has an awkward script, stilted acting and meager budget … oftentimes the images seem murky, from Mascot’s policy of starting filming at first light of pre-dawn and not stopping till near-dark.

   But it’s infused with that cheap energy typical of Mascot at its best, with vigorous stunting from Yakima Canutt, earnest playing from Frankie Darro, Betsy King Ross and George Brent (long before he met Bette Davis!) plus some truly fresh location work and the usual over-ambitious straining for effects way beyond its slender budget.

   There’s a particularly neat bit with the principals jumping between ore carts from an old mine, suspended on a cable over a vertiginous chasm; not at all convincing, but you gotta give ’em credit for trying.

   The plot, if there is one, even has some poetic overtones: something about an Indian Tribe that mysteriously vanished years ago, suddenly resurrected to terrorize a remote settlement at the behest of a black-cloaked figure known only as The Wolfman, whose appearances are announced by blood-curdling howls and … well, as the chapters go by, it develops that The Wolfman must actually be one of the townspeople, but which one? The Shifty Sherriff? The Mad Trapper? The Mysterious Stranger? Marvin Hamlisch? Dick Cheney?

   Well, you needn’t look for clues, as everyone in the cast except Rinty takes turns looking guilty, and the last chapter reveals a solution that would strain the credulity of Harry Stephen Keeler, but it’s mostly fun along the way, and if Rinty gets no big emotional scenes, at least he (or his stunt-dogs) stay busy.

THE WIND AND THE LION. MGM, 1975. Sean Connery, Candice Bergen, Brian Keith, John Huston. Screenwriter & director: John Milius.

   I’ve taken my time in getting my notes and opinions written up on this film, a semi-historical movie I watched about a week ago. It’s one that takes place during the tenure of Teddy Roosevelt in office of the President of the United States; or in other words, circa 1905.

   There was at that time an actual American citizen kidnapped by a tribe of Berbers in Morocco, but the victim then was a man, and in the movie it is a woman (Candice Bergen) with two young children.

   Doing the kidnapping is Mulay Hamid El Raisuli, Lord of the Riff, Sultan to the Berbers, Last of the Barbary Pirates (Sean Connery), and if Sean Connery can play El Raisuli as well as he does in The Wind and the Lion, why then, he can play almost anybody. (But we all knew that anyway, didn’t we?)

   This causes a diplomatic crisis of huge international proportions. Almost as good as Sean Connery is in his role is Brian Keith in his, that of Teddy Roosevelt, and you should take it for granted that no one has or ever will play Teddy Roosevelt (in full imperial mode) as well as Brian Keith.

   Global politics being what they were, both the French and Germans are involved in the attempt to negotiate the return of the kidnapped woman, Eden Pedecaris, but with Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” policy as backup plan, if you the viewer are ever in doubt as to whether or not the US Marines will be called in, you need not be concerned.

   They are, and in full force. Part of the thrill of watching this movie is for the sheer adventure of it all. With the US in full cognizance of its new role in the world, the Marines are simply itching to take over, and eventually they do.

   While John Milius is a strong right-of-center conservative — and if I’m in error about that, please let me know — his portrayal of the Moroccan Arabs and the plight of the nomadic tribes in the face of oncoming history feels (to me) both accurate and sympathetic.

   The thrust of the tale, of course, is the conflicting bond between El Raisuli and his prisoner, the outspoken and openly defiant Mrs. Pedecaris, who in turn grows to respect her captor and his increasingly desperate situation more than she ever realized she ever would or could.

   And yet. All is well and good in my description so far, but there was much to this film that equally displeased me — well, no, disappointed is a far better word. Each scene was well-set and well-filmed, but I found there was no cohesive structure to the film, or at least not enough, and events that were meant to be personal were shot as if at arm’s length far too often, as it were — if not literally, then figuratively speaking.

   It is not clear (or not to me) how and why the Germans got so intimately involved in Raisuli’s capture at the end, but that Mrs Pedecaris had something to say about that was both rousing and satisfying.

   If this sounds like a mixed review, I’m as surprised as you are. When I started writing up my thoughts about the movie, I was prepared to go almost totally negative, and I ended up far more positive than I expected.

   (I no longer plan out ahead of time what I am going to say in one of these reviews. After a certain amount of time has passed by, and this varies, I simply sit down and start typing.)

   There are a lot of artfully created scenes in this movie, and I am sure that is why it received a considerable number of nominations for various awards or another. If you like a rousing adventure movie as much as the next guy, I think you’ll enjoy it as much as he does.

EAGLE EYE. DreamWorks, 2008. Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chiklis, Billy Bob Thornton. Director: D.J. Caruso.

   This is one of those thriller movies in which events start to happen as soon as the movie begins, almost faster than you can assimilate them, and the reason that you can’t put the pieces together is that they’re pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle that takes time – be patient – until at last – finally – one key piece snaps into place, and all of sudden – but not before – do you see the big picture.

   Wonder of wonders, the people who made this movie made sure that the key piece I’m talking about is not discovered for a full three-quarters of the way through a two-hour movie.

   That’s a long time to keep people in the dark, so to speak, and I take my cap off to the director, screenwriters and players for pulling it off so successfully for so long.

   There are two main players, one male and one female, both in some sort of terrible danger and brought together to accomplish some sort of errand, plus one other whose name is not even mentioned above: a female voice on the phone whose commands must be obeyed, or else.

   This female voice also seems to have at her command every cell phone, every on street camera, every public piece of electronic equipment in the entire country, and more, leading Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), suspected terrorist, and Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan), mother of a young son on a trip with his school band to play in a concert somewhere unspecified, on a series of more and more complicated errands – to do what?

   Other reviews of this movie may tell you more than I will, or intend to. Suffice it to say that you will be sitting on the edge of your seat (figuratively, and maybe even literally) for a good solid portion of the two hours you will spend watching it.

   I suppose there is an underlying moral involved, or maybe more than one, and one of them (which I think you can gather yourself from the paragraph above) is that there is not nearly enough privacy in this country any more. You may think you are alone, but very seldom are you alone as you think you are.

   After watching this movie, you may wish to give up your cell phones and GPS’s and maybe even your laptop computers that you take with you everywhere, but who among us is willing to do that?

   There are some political considerations that are also involved, and lots and lots of action scenes, with cars roaring up and down streets and turning over on their sides with lots of flames bursting from them, and all kinds of heavy machinery doing the unknown female voice’s bidding. You will not be bored.

   Shia LaBeouf is young and rather light weight as an actor, but he does well in this film and the Transformer movies in which a lightweight, or a slacker, is exactly the persona that’s needed. He didn’t do so well in the Indiana Jones movie he was in, in my opinion. The gravitas of a Harrison Ford he doesn’t have, yet.

   Michelle Monaghan, who was such a successful femme fatale in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, doesn’t have nearly the same opportunity in Eagle Eye to display her glamorous side. Frantic, though, she does very well, and overall, both actors are very determined to be a good sports about being in this movie. Both get solid A’s for Effort, and it shows. The screenwriters (all four of them) might have done it without them, but it would have been awfully difficult.

SAFARI. Columbia, 1956. Victor Mature, Janet Leigh, John Justin, Roland Culver, Orlando Martins, Earl Cameron. Director: Terence Young.

   Pull out a chair and sit down a while. This movie is so filled with cliched situations and characters that if I were to list them all, you’d be here an awfully long time.

   On second thought, maybe I should only tell about the main ones, and in so doing, leave it to you decide how much time and effort you might want to spend in tracking down a copy:

    ? An expert African guide (Victor Mature) thirsts for revenge against the leader (Earl Cameron) of a gang of rebellious Mau Maus who killed his family while he was away.

    ? His license revoked for his own good, Ken Duffield is hired anyway by a wealthy hunter (Roland Culver) who is used to getting his own way and knows how to pull the right strings.

    ? Joining them on the hunt for a notorious lion is Sir Vincent’s fiancée (Janet Leigh) who used to be a showgirl but is now intent on bagging bigger game.

    ? Also on the safari is Sir Vincent’s personal assistant (John Justin), a man whose weaknesses his employer sadistically digs his knives into at every chance he gets, figuratively speaking.

   Dressed in tight-fitting jungle outfits during the day, and then in formal wear and the finest of negligees in the evening, Janet Leigh is present only as eye candy, for needing to be rescued when she wanders too far from camp, and for reawakening Victor Mature’s interest in life.

   Sir Vincent’s role is more complicated: to be an obnoxious boor of an employer whose every whim is to be obeyed, immediately, and of course you know exactly how far that’s going to get him.

   I think that about wraps it up. I hope not many animals were really shot and killed in the making of this rather mediocre movie, filmed in color on location in Kenya, or so I’m told. Quite possibly in its day it made a much greater impression.

CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER. Alllied Artists, 1962. Vincent Price, Linda Ho, Richard Loo, June Kim, Philip Ahn, Victor Sen Yung. Screenplay: Robert Hill, based on the novel Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. Director: Albert Zugsmith.

   De Quincy was Thomas de Quincy, an English decadent who is best remembered for his books Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, and Confessions of an Opium Eater, works that graced many a Victorian library shelf and were read under many a blanket by young boys. Not very promising material for a film of high adventure.

   The place is mid-nineteenth century San Francisco’s Chinatown, that dark haven of mystery and low adventure celebrated in a thousand pulp tales (and little relation to the the real thing).

   Into this cauldron of the exotic and erotic swaggers our two-fisted sailor hero, Gilbert de Quincy, a man who knows his way around a brawl, a broad, and a bottle — Vincent Price.

   Did I mention this is a very odd little film?

   Vincent is in Chinatown to find his old friend Richard Loo, but before you can say Kung Pao Chicken, he is up to his neck in the sex-slavery racket of Chinese girls imported from the mainland and sold as concubines and prostitutes to wealthy and ruthless men. Loo is out to smash the racket, and Vincent finds himself reluctantly part of the crusade when a few innocent inquiries nearly get him killed. He’s walked right into a hornet’s nest.

   And what a hornet’s nest. Pretty girls in chains, exotic dances, Oriental finery, secret passages, trap doors, a collection of S&M gear that would make de Sade salivate, a mouthy Chinese midget concubine in a golden cage, and a full blown sex auction beneath the dark and narrow streets of old Chinatown — just a few of the elements of this one. The scenes of Price imprisoned in a bamboo cage suspended off the floor are worth the price of admission alone.

   There are also innocent young women thrown overboard in chains whenever another ship gets too close to the smugglers, bodies washed up on the beach, tong hatchet men, and of course the obligatory psychedelic trip for Vincent on the ‘smoke of dreams.’

   This is sheer melodrama, a barn-burner as the Brits used to call them, with hammy performances, fortune cookie dialogue, and enough angst for a dozen soap operas. It’s nice to see Loo get to play a hero for once, and if you ever wondered how Vincent Price would do in a role better suited to John Wayne, now you know.

   The movie does at times have a nice claustrophobic feel of the alien and the strange about it, and the cheap sets and curious camera work sometimes manage to convey the feeling you are watching this entire movie in someone else’s opium-fevered dream. During one or two of the fights you half expect the entire place to come down like the great earthquake, and whether deliberately or not, Price’s sheer size gives his character a bull in a China shop feel that adds to the alienation and foreignness of his surroundings.

   Confessions is only a little less politically incorrect than say, a Fu Manchu movie, but at least there is some effort made to present some of the Asian characters as people and not just stereotypes. Not much, but some.

   Silly, stupid, and ridiculous as this one is, it is also undeniably fun to watch in the same guilty pleasure way of reading or watching old “Yellow Peril” pulp fiction from yesteryear.

   Price clearly knows the level of material he has to work with here, but to his credit he has some fun with it, and seems to enjoy playing the two-fisted adventurer while fully aware how miscast he is in the role.

   No one embarrasses themselves or their careers in this movie, and in one like this one, that’s almost the best they can hope for.

   That said, after watching this one you might want to go out for Italian or Mexican instead. Too much MSG can give you an awful headache.

   Note:  It’s been a while since I read de Quincy, but I don’t think his opium dreams yielded anything quite like this. Just as well Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire never smoked what this movie is selling.

CAPTAIN SINDBAD. MGM-Germany, 1963, aka Kapitän Sindbad. Guy Williams, Heidi Brühl, Pedro Armendariz, Abraham Sofaer, Bernie Hamilton, Helmuth Schneider, Henry Brandon, Guy Doleman. Co-screenwriters: Ian McLellan Hunter and Guy Endore; director: Byron Haskin.

   Like Son of Sinbad [reviewed here] Captain Sindbad is in Technicolor too, but it’s a ruddy, comic book color: cheap, gaudy, and enjoyably eye-watering. The sets are lavish but cheesy-looking, costumes likewise, and everything seems pointed at an ostentatious show of threadbare splendor, with swordfights, shipwrecks, riots and magic stuff tumbling out like cut-rate toys from a shabby bag.

   Simply splendid.

   Guy Wiliams, in between Zorro and Lost in Space, stars as Sindbad, pitted against evil poo-bah Pedro Armendariz, an actor who appeared in real movies, like Three Godfathers and From Russia with Love.

   Here though, he just sits around in a chintzy palace with vaulted purple ceilings, blood red carpets and golden dragons all over (just the way you or I would decorate a palace if money and taste were no object) and hatches evil schemes with the kind of hammy relish I hadn’t seen since Tod Slaughter.

   Okay, it’s kind of a catch-penny thing, but as written by Guy Endore, and directed by Byron Haskin, Captain Sindbad has a sleazy charm I just can’t resist. There’s always something happening on screen, and the special effects, though never convincing, are always imaginative and even kind of poetic at times.

   I particularly liked how the bad guy can’t be killed because he keeps his heart locked up in a tower an enchanted forest, guarded by a giant hand — I guess we’ve all known someone like that, haven’t we? It’s storybook stuff presented with childlike gusto by people old enough to know better and a film no eight-year-old should miss.