Reviews

This film is a true joy, and one of Hawks's greatest works, though it's often underrated. It has all the great Hawksian themes: adventure, feisty women and cool men who, no matter how cool they are, need the feisty women. It's also a great classic Western, with beautiful outdoor photography and a terribly poetic evocation of going down the Missourri (it's vaguely based on Lewis and Clark). It's leisurely and enthralling in the way only Ford and Hawks could do. While Arthur Hunnicut in no Walter Brennan, and Dewey Martin is cute rather than great, Kirk is superb as ever. Don't miss.

This film re-iterates the theory given in Plato's republic (and in HG Wells's Invisible Man)that the man is only just when he fears reprisal, and therefore unjust when he is invisible. And it has the inimitable Josh Brolin. Verhoeven is too perverse a director to make straightforward intelligent movies. So, like Starship Troopers, the film is framed as a conventional, dumb as mud, sci-fi thriller. The joke is fundamentally on the viewer, Verhoeven's aim being to prove that deep down we share his hollow man's hollow vision. Exploitation masquerading as art or vice versa? Up to you.