Fri 18 Jan 2013
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: THE CORRUPT ONES (1965).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews[2] Comments
THE CORRUPT ONES. Warner Brothers, 1965. Robert Stack, Elke Sommer and Nancy Kwan. Screenplay by Harald Bloom, Arp Brown, Brian Clemens, Georges Farrel and Ladislas Fodor. Directed by James Hill and Frank Winterstein.
A splashy Technicolor B-movie without a single deep thought in any of its 87 minutes — and great fun if you’re in the mood.
This stars Robert Stack and Elke Sommer, with support from Nancy Kwan, so right away you know it ain’t gonna get any awards for acting, but then you don’t come to a film like this expecting to see Laurence Olivier; you come for action, and Corrupt Ones has plenty.
The film opens with scenes of a few score uniformed Red Chinese soldiers guarding about a half dozen women working in a rice paddy, with Robert Stack hiding nearby snapping pictures. I thought at first this must be some super-secret scientific project — atomic rice taking over the world or something — but it turns out it’s just how the filmmakers thought things were like in Red China: peasants toiling and hordes of gun-toting goons keeping them in line, so it turns out Robert Stack is merely a free-lance photographer working out of Hong Kong, getting all this for a magazine. Well a chase ensues and Stack is rescued by a guy who dies, but before he goes he passes on a medallion that bears the key to a lost treasure.
So you’ve got your lost treasure, and your hero, and pretty soon you get your stacked heroine, Elke (who else?) Sommer and a gangster played by Christian Marquand and a dragon-lady played by Nancy Kwan.
Having walked onstage, the four of them proceed to chase each other around, shooting, fighting, kidnapping, fighting some more, torturing, chasing some more, and generally filing the screen with mindless carnage for eighty minutes. Yeah, Stack’s character is supposed to be a photographer, but he’s so handy with his fists that when Elke gets kidnapped (again) he thinks nothing of walking into the local den of heavily-armed thieves and setting about the blighters single-handed.
Nancy Kwan looks suitably imperious in her jade palace filled with S/M goodies, and Christian Marquand — well, his job here is to supply a lot of thugs to be knocked about and he performs this undemanding task reliably. Likewise, Elke Sommer has little to do but look good, which she does quite nicely, thank you.
Director James Hill (his credits include Born Free and A Study in Terror) handles all this in appropriately slap-dash fashion, with no discernible artistry, but never so clumsy as to be noticeable, and always fastfastfast. The photography is similarly loud, unfussy and colorful enough to distract the viewer from the inane things the characters say and the dumb stuff they do. Mostly.
What got me wondering though was the title of the piece: The Corrupt Ones. I mean, the bad guys in this are mean and nasty, but they’re pretty forthright about being bad guys; there’s a bent cop in the mix, but just one. So who are the corrupt ones? Then I took a closer look at the credits; it took two men to direct this bit of gaudy fluff and five to write it. Five. To write this?!?! What the hell were they doing for their money? Or perhaps when they titled it, they were talking about themselves….
January 18th, 2013 at 10:50 pm
You picked a fun one for credit junkies. From looking at the movie’s on screen credits in YouTube clip, visiting IMdb and TCMdb, here is my guess.
It was directed by James Hill. Frank Winterstein as assistant director probably filmed the action scenes or took over from Hill who might had been fired or quit.
The story was by Ladislas Fodor, a German screenwriter and playwright. The screenplay was Brian Clemens (The Avengers).
Harald Bloom may have been Harry Jack Bloom. Arp Brown is probably a pseudonym of someone who didn’t want his or her name on this.
George Farrel is a French writer.
TCMdb says the movie has problems with the credits for writer and directors. Its country of origin is confused (TCM has it as French). The movie is also know as THE PEKING MEDALLION and HELL TO MACAO.
I suspect the script went through many rewrites by the gang of writers. This is not unusual. Even today it is common to have writers take turns with the script (they are called script doctors). During the old studio days writers would often be asked to punch up a script, maybe adding gags.
I suspect this film got butchered in post by editing. Especially since this movie is supposed to be 92 minutes long.
January 22nd, 2013 at 9:59 pm
I’ve always had a soft spot for this movie. Part of the appeal is the Dusty Springfield theme song you’ve linked above; it’s possible that the title comes from the tune rather than vice versa. I also like that it includes the f-word a good two years before I’ll Never Forget Whatsisname and Ulysses.
From your description of the beginning, I might be familiar with a different cut of the movie. My VHS copy opens with a pre-credits sequence of a brawling fistfight on a train, which ends with the winner retrieving the medallion; he later passes it on to Stack just as you describe.