Reviews

Ben Gazzara is not the Jack Flowers I saw in Paul Theroux' novel; he's too self-confident by half. But different in tone as they may be, both Theroux' and Bogdanovich's "Saint Jack" are successes. The location shooting in Singapore and the utter lack of background music are among Bogdanovich's own touches. It's a fine, solid little film, sexy, political and all over bright. Gazzara works as a gofer for a Chinese business to maintain his visa. But his dream is to open his own brothel, which with the backing of a few friends, he does. But the Chinese "mafia" closes him down (the confrontation with a Chinese midget and his musclemen is memorable). And then the CIA, represented by Peter Bogdanovith, subsidizes Flowers in a new brothel for Viet troops on R&R. It lasts as long as the war does (his former Chinese employer rags Gazzara about the Vietnamese victory). Then Gazzara is forced into some sleazy blackmail which, finally, he rejects. A moral decision in a very amoral story. British actor James Villiers has a small but distinctive part as Frogget. In a conversation with bar cronies he says: "The last time I was in UK they made homosexuality legal. I said to my wife, I said let's get out of here before they make it compulsory." This is not on DVD yet. Why the hell not?

Ask most people who brought black actors into serious roles and they'll say Sidney Poitier. Wrong. Before Poitier was James Edwards. Watch him in "Home of the Brave" and "Pork Chop Hill" and no less in this picture. (Ironically, his last role was as a "menial," Scott's orderly in "Patton.") He's been under-appreciated in the sociology of movies.

But Edwards doesn't star here, rather it's Arthur Kennedy, who never quite made it as a lead and was soon regularly cast as a charming villain, much like Dan Duryea before him. Nevertheless, he handles this role, a soldier permanently blinded in the war undergoing extensive VA rehabilitation, as well as could be done. We learn things about blindness in "Bright Victory," about its lows and the courage it takes to cope with it. The racist issue is secondary but by no means muted. It may be a little simplistic to proclaim that the racist divide is simply a visual prejudice--that to a blind man everybody is the same color--but it's a start.

Another important prejudice issue is about handicaps. Kennedy's high school sweetheart has to finally reject him because she realizes she can't cope with his blindness (contrast with "The Best Years of Our Lives"). Even his parents have to teach themselves to deal with it.

It's a tough-minded film, all in all, unique in its way, not meant to be "heartwarming" as films about the handicapped seem to have to be these days.

As did Red Skelton in his time, Dom DeLuise has a very sweet on-screen persona. He's the kind of guy you'd trust your kids to.

Anne Bancroft, a multi-talented lady sorely missed, wrote and directed a picture here on a topic not ever before focused on, overeating. Given that the US has become the fattest country on earth and the most obsessed with weight loss, it's surprising no filmmaker has ever taken the topic on the way they have drugs or drinking or racism. Maybe it's just too close to home.

The funny thing is that DeLuise himself, unlike some of the bit players in the picture, is not all that fat, seriously chubby, to be sure, not bathing suit material, but not really obese. Never mind. He's told he is and thinks he is and has a hell of a confused and guilty time with it. "Why does everybody want me to be skinny?" he asks himself. "I'm not such a bad guy."

The "message," that love conquers all shortcomings, including gluttony, is a little pat and predictable. But it would be churlish to come down hard on such a well-meaning, well- written, well-directed and well-played comedy. Catch it when you can.

This may be the least sentimental film I can think of. Mitchum himself is seen as a petty hood way out of his league, and comes the closest to eliciting a modicum of sympathy from us. But everyone else is utterly unlikeable, Peter Boyle as a bartender and mob functionary, Stephen Keats as a gun runner, and particularly Richard Jordan as an ice cold undercover cop ("Have a nice day").

Mitchum is a desperate gun mule trying to work both sides of the fence by being an informer on the people he's working for. He's such a loser that his information is always too late to do him any good. Keats buys guns from army thieves and sells them to anybody--very cautiously (nice scene where he faces down one of his customers, a female "revolutionary" Weatherman type in a VW bus looking to buy machine guns). A secondary plot involving a bank stickup has the thieves covering themselves in eerie translucent masks that were state-of-the-art in costume stores then.

Real grit. "Pulp Fiction" without the pulp fiction. And Mitchum's Bahstin accent is right on.

In the '50s the nuclear holocaust was never far from the popular imagination. This picture is one of many fictional efforts to show what might have happened.

By being trapped in a Pennsylvania mine, Belafonte is one of the very few people on earth (as far as we know from the film, only three) to escape annihilation. He manages to get out of the mine on his own (the first of many plot contrivances), goes to New York City and finds it depopulated, except for Inger Stevens, who eventually comes out of hiding. It's mostly a picture about loneliness. As much as we may resent the jostling masses in our midst, what if they were gone?

Actually, it spurs a fantasy, too. Imagine that you had the pickings of all of New York to yourself, and imagine that you were a handyman who could rig up generators and the like, and imagine that you found a comely woman to keep you company. Could be worse.

But we are asked to ignore too much in the picture, the fact that only one person in all of the city survived, the fact that not a single rotting body is shown on the streets, the fact that the shortwave transmissions Belafonte regularly monitors show that the rest of the world is empty, too (except, eventually, for Mel Ferrer, who was sailing during the nuclear blasts)-- all a bit too much. The film tries too hard to be an allegory when it should have been good, logical science fantasy.

Nevertheless, TWTF&TD is well worth a watch.

Except for its patent anti-racist message at the end, this is a top-notch caper picture. Harry Belafonte as an in-debt horse player, Robert Ryan as a southerner with a temper living off a suitably blowzy Shelly Winters, Ed Begley as a bitter ex-cop--all come together in a tightly planned bank hold-up in a small NY town upstate. The black-and-white photography makes you wonder why they ever used color for anything other than musicals and cartoons.

Belafonte's acting never came up to his singing, but he does all right here. Ryan was a consummate actor, and Begley is perfectly cast. Gloria Grahame has a very small part but was never sexier.

The soundtrack, by the Modern Jazz Quartet, may be better than the picture itself (I listen to it all the time), but that's not to slight this gritty little crime flick.

Even for two well-established film actors, a script which promises that they will be alone with virtually all the lines must be golden. And this is basically a two-actor picture, fortunately for us starring two of the best actors in the medium.

Mitchum and Kerr, the marine and the nun, at first alone on an island then visited by Japanese then alone again then visited again, are given scores of great two-person scenes together. Mitchum is by turns big brother and suitor to Kerr. She is throughout his kid sister and tentative spiritual savior. A very delicate relationship very delicately rendered, intermixed with action and suspense as Mitchum has his furtive skirmishes with the Japanese occupiers.

I think no exchange better exemplifies the differences between the underlying world view of the two than toward the end. The Americans will be invading in the morning. Mitchum is concerned about the hidden Japanese howitzers that will do serious damage to the invading craft. He has a brainstorm:

RM: Ma'm, you said that God might tell us what to do. Well his voice don't have to be loud and come from above, does it? DK: Oh no, Mr. Allison. It's usually a small voice that comes from within. RM: In that case, I think he's talking to me now. DK: Really, Mr. Allison? RM: Yes, Ma'm, and he's sayin' this landing's going to be real easy like, with hardly nobody being killed. DK: Oh, thank God. But are you sure it's God talking to you, Mr. Allison, and not just your own desire to get into the fighting. RM: (thinking a second) Pretty sure, ma'm. And it's so simple I shoulda thought of it myself.

I love this picture, unlikely as its scenario might be, and I never tire of watching it.

One minor glitch: Mitchum refers to the island as an atoll. It's clearly a high island.

Rod Serling is best remembered--if remembered at all--as the guy with the cigarette telling us in his carefully articulated manner that we were about to enter...the Twilight Zone. But Serling didn't stick exclusively to science fiction. For one thing he wrote "Requiem for a Heavyweight," turned into a pretty good film with Anthony Quinn, Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney. For another, he wrote this one, "Patterns," a tight, modest but memorable picture about Big Business in the '50s, when boardrooms were filled with white males and the secretary pool with white females.

Heflin (who was never less than excellent in all his roles) has been hired out of his small Ohio business to join a big firm in New York. He quickly makes friends with Ed Begley, the firm's old timer who, it soon becomes clear, is being squeezed out by hard-nosed Everett Sloane. Therein lies the tension in the film.

Unlike the big corporation in "Executive Suite," which is clearly a furniture manufacturer, Slone's company is only vaguely defined, apparently a holding company with its fingers in many pies. We get just enough of the workings of the company to give it an authentic feel. The bulk of the picture is the Sloane-Begley conflict, which Heflin gets drawn into.

Sloane's single-minded character is encapsulated in a quick scene: Begley's teen-age son is waiting for his father after hours in the hall. Sloane walks by and the boy says, "Good evening, Mr. Ramsey" "Hello, Paul," says Ramsey as he passes. "Taking your vitamins, are you?" "I guess so, sir."

There's one little bit of logic that doesn't ring true. After a heated exchange with the boss, Begley is stewing alone in his office. Heflin, trying to give sound advice to him, asks why he doesn't retire. "Because," says Begley, "I'm 62 years old and I don't think I could get another job." Begley has worked for the company for 30 years and in those days of secure pensions he surely could retire. Why indeed doesn't he?

But "Patterns" is a model of tight, fat-free film making (no godawful background music, for one thing) that should be aired much more often than it is.

You can't begrudge an actor super-success; that's what they all crave for, if for nothing else, to allow them the luxury of choosing the scripts they want. But nevertheless it's kind of a shame that Leonardo DiCaprio has never been the same since "Titanic." In three of his earlier films--"What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" "The Basketball Diaries," and this one--he had a promise not quite seen since James Dean, whom bad luck prevented from going beyond his own early promise.

DiCaprio is excellent here as a frustrated teen-age stepson to DeNiro's petty and jealous stepfather. (Ellen Barkin holds her own between them, but how quickly she went from a teen bride in "Diner" to a romantic lead in "The Big Easy" to the mother of a teenager in "This Boy's Life"! Hollywood devours actresses.) One forgets how powerless kids are to the parents who keep them fed. Watch DiCaprio trying to play high school basketball in slippery cordovans because DeNiro won't buy him sneakers. Watch his frustration in learning that DeNiro has traded his rifle for a dog he doesn't want. Watch his rebellion in sneaking off in DeNiro's car, singing to the car radio (man, does that bring back memories) and later his attempts at being cool with his buddies. smoking cigarettes and sporting a DA haircut like they do. Watch him in fact throughout.

But for all that, he's not a whit better than DeNiro in this movie. First of all, DeNiro has adopted an accent far removed from his gangster roles, with flat vowels and a whining drawl. And he's not a totally unsympathetic character, just a petty bully with a taste for Perry Como. A final scene where he challenges DiCaprio with a not-quite-empty mustard jar perfectly captures his smallness. And if we haven't already guessed that DeNiro is a supremely disappointed man, it's made clear when DiCaprio finally finagles a prep school scholarship and actually leaves, his mother too. "How about me?" DeNiro shouts at their backs. "When is it my turn?"

A couple of shortcomings: It's never really made clear the relationship between DeNiro and his two daughters by his first marriage. They don't develop at all. And also, there's a brief and unnecessary sex scene between DeNiro and Barkin that shows his minor kink. This scene doesn't appear in Wolff's memoir and shouldn't be here.

Ah, Leo, we knew ye when.

Though I've read only a couple of dozen of the nearly 500 comments on this film, I didn't see any from ex-Marines who'd had the Parris Island experience. I went through PI in 1957. The time period in the picture would have been about 1967, since the in-country sequence includes the '68 Tet Offensive. Little had changed in those 10 years except the switch from M1s to M16s.

For the most part Kubrick got Parris Island right on the money. And why shouldn't he have, since his screen DI, Lee Ermey was in fact a real DI before he started acting (he played another DI in "The Boys of Company C," an earlier and lesser Vietnam flick)? He had a built- in technical adviser. The screams and insults and profanity and physical punishment were all part of the DIs armamentarium. When you're facing up to 75 young strangers you need to immediately establish absolute authority and hang on to it for 13 weeks. Furthermore, you want to break the breakable as soon as you can. My platoon had its Private Pyles and though none ended up as he does in "Full Metal Jacket," I remember that they simply disappeared from our ranks, never to be heard from again. Nothing Ermey as Sgt. Hartman does is exaggerated.

Kubrick, however, does exaggerate. Speaking of Pyle's ending, it's almost impossible for me to imagine that a recruit could manage to sneak a clip of live rounds away from the rifle range. Every shooter at the range has his own rifle coach, and every single round is very carefully accounted for. Kubrick started the killing one scene too early.

I've read that DIs nowadays are forbidden to use the time-honored f-word, and are not allowed to lay hands on recruits. I don't know if that's good or bad for training (I had my face slapped hard my first day of boot camp and that was just for openers), but then all of us old-timers like to brag about how tough it useta be!

A final note: It's interesting to compare "Full Metal Jacket" to another attempt at a portrayal of Parris Island, Jack Webb's "The DI," made around '55 or '56. Webb tries for authenticity, but as I was to learn a year or so later, his PI was a boy scout camp.

As a previous comment suggests, Fred MacMurray had the rare talent for both serious drama and comedy that Cary Grant had. (I've always thought James Garner could have been in that circle had he only gotten the right scripts.)

In the late '30s and early '40s Hollywood had fun with hillbillies (remember Judy Canova?). This is an example. The genre seems to have been put to bed with Deliverance, which took all the fun out of the backwoods.

There are too many set comic scenes in Murder, He Says to relate. It's simply a superb comedy-mystery. I guess my two favorite bits are where a desperate MacMurray pretends to see a ghost and the twins aren't just too sure he doesn't see one. Then there's the fall-out-of- your-chair comic turn where MacMurray sits in a box on the groggy body of one of his pursuers--whose protruding legs have a life of their own. You really have to be there. Why isn't this thing televised more often?

Though I've yet to hear a satisfactory explanation of the title (maybe it has something to do with the digits necessary to open a safe), that's the only thing I can fault with this superb thriller. It's roughly based on a real incident in WWII, how rough doesn't matter; if it didn't happen exactly this way, it should have.

James Mason has never put to better use his by turns servile and arrogant personae. He's an Albanian, personal valet to the British ambassador in neutral Turkey. He has a dream of a villa in Rio and to realize it he needs money. In his privileged position he can open the embassy safe (we never learn how he finagled the combination), photograph secret documents and sell them, after much initially suspicious resistance, to the German embassy.

He then convinces his former Albanian boss' wife, broke, to hold the money for him, using what she needs to keep court. He even convinces himself that he's won her over emotionally, too.

The twists and turns that follow as he's almost caught by the British authorities keep the film hopping along at a tense pace. The ending is Hollywood irony at its best. Totally unexpected.

Look for it where you can. It rarely pops up on TV anymore.

This is a far too seldom televised Cagney picture, made in his more mature years. Cagney is top-notch as an alcoholic reporter finally scared enough by the threat of death ("Angel feathers," his reformed alcoholic savior James Gleason tells him) to go on the wagon. He's enlisted by his publisher boss Raymond Massey to mentor--basically slap some sense into-- Massey's incipient alcoholic nephew, Gig Young. The plot is rather work-a-day, and Cagney is all too dynamic for a recovering alcoholic; he never convinces us that being dry is agony. Moreover, it shows none of the stark horror of alcoholism better dramatized in The Lost Weekend or Days of Wine and Roses. Yet the script is taut and it's always a treat to watch Cagney at work. And James Gleason, one of the most personable of character actors, was never better. Watch his expectant face as he tries his daily attempt at a pseudo Bloody Mary on his roommate, Cagney. "Still tomato juice," they say in unison.

I guess I've seen all of Meryl Streep's movies--even the silly one where her head is on backwards--but I think she was never better than in Plenty. It's basically a story about an English woman who risked her young life working for the French underground during the war and had the highest hopes for the world that would follow after the war ended. The film traces her increasing disgust with what in fact did follow.

She takes a succession of jobs--clerk for a shipping company, functionary for QE II's coronation, assistant producer for a TV ad company--while simultaneously married to stiff but devoted British diplomat Charles Dance and intermittently entertained by bohemian Tracy Ullman. Throughout all her disillusionment she hangs on to the memory of a quick affair with an English paratrooper she met in France. A token he gave her becomes the symbol of her hope.

Dance is top-notch as her long-suffering husband, trying to cope with her bouts of instability. Gielgud is excellent as Dance's boss, an ambassador trying to cope with British foreign policy. A short encounter between Streep and a Foreign Service bureaucrat, no less than Ian McKellan, is a sterling scene. Throughout the film the dialogue is as sharp as a razor.

All in all, I can't think of any film which more pointedly contrasts the drama of the war years with the anti-climax of the post-war years. It gives new meaning to The Best Years of Our Lives.

Others have summarized this film quite well. I would only add that it's unique in being the only good film I can readily remember that consists of nothing but supporting players. Not a star among 'em. Billy Bush Green, Geoffrey Lewis, Luke Askew, Bo Hopkins and many others are indelibly played, e.g., the stuttering barkeep who keeps a "genuine former virgin" in the back room; the Mexican cantina owner who keeps a rattlesnake in a jar and wins money from customers by betting they can't hold their hand against the glass when the snake strikes; the preacher who declares of the land his followers stop at as the "place God has chosen for us" until the shooting starts and he decides to move because "God was only testing us."

Gene Autry and Smiley Burnette it ain't. Catch it if you can.

Sadly, after his best actor Oscar for "The Lost Weekend" Milland never really got a good role again, except for Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder." But he worked steadily and was never less than very good, even in turkeys like "The Man with X-ray Eyes." Milland fans should not miss his work in this low-budget survival drama.

The premise is that Milland, his wife and two teenage kids (one of whom is Frankie Avalon, short enough to be a credible teenager) get an early start on a vacation in the mountains east of LA. Before sunup LA is destroyed by nuclear bombs, and the movie kicks into high gear and stays there. Milland quickly takes charge of the situation with a cynical foresight which eventually saves his family and him during the breakdown of civilization.

Though he is a basically good man, he intuits that morality will be a relative concept during this disaster and acts accordingly: he apologetically but ruthlessly holds up a hardware store to supply himself; he tries (but is foiled by wife Jean Hagen) to blow away a carload of teen ruffians intent on raping the womenfolk; he causes a traffic pile up in order to get where he's going, and then covers his tracks into the mountains; grimmest of all, he coolly shoots the teen age hooligans (the same we saw earlier) after they have raped his daughter. (Believe me, they deserve it.)

Given the era in which this picture was made, it has to end on hope. It does. Civilization starts to return but only with the help of Army machine guns (more cynicism). All in all, this is a gritty, tightly plotted picture you can't turn away from. Check it out.