Reviews

The Last Hunt is the forgotten Hollywood classic western. The theme of genocide via buffalo slaughter is present in other films but never so savagely. Robert Taylor's against-type role as the possessed buffalo and Indian killer is his finest performance.

In the 1950s, your mom dropped you and your friends off at the Saterday matinée, usually featuring a western or comedy. But it was wrong then and now to let a youngster watch psycho-dramas like The Searchers and The Last Hunt. Let the kids wait a few years before exposing them to films with repressed sexual sadism and intense racial hatred.

Why did Mom fail to censor these films? Because they featured "safe" Hollywood stars like Taylor and John Wayne. But the climatic scene in The Last Hunt is as horrifying as Vincent Price's mutation in The Fly.

The mythology of the white buffalo, part of the texture of this movie, was later ripped-off by other movies including The White Buffalo, starring Charles Bronson as Wild Bill Hickock. The laugh here is that Bronson used to play Indians.

Today a large remnant bison herd resides in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. In the winter, hunger forces surplus animals out of the park into Montana, where they are sometimes harvested by Idaho's Nez Perce Indians under a US treaty right that pre-dates the Lincoln Presidency. Linclon signed the Congressional act which authorized the continental railroad and started the buffalo slaughter.

Wake up and smell the coffee, IMDb film school student reviewers. WW II kept Hollywood actors working in war movies like The Guns of Navarone for 25 years or so. Never mind what the MGM Lion says in his Latin platitude, Hollywood was and is about making money and veteran actors like Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn were a guarantee the audience would show.

The classic war flicks Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia were made around the same time as "Guns", which is about a half star below them. If you really want to see old acting fish out of water, watch In Harm's Way.

The Hollywood generational war movie torch was passed around the time Kelly's Heros was made, with Clint Eastwood and cast coming from the Korean War era. Other movies at the time, like M*A*S*H and Catch-22 continued the trend of younger actors taking over. However, that generation fell off the age wagon, too. See Eastwood in Heartbreak Ridge and Lee Marvin in The Big Red One.

Perhaps the movie of the era that did the best job of trying to match the believable ages of the characters and actors was The Young Lions, with Dean Martin, Marlin Brando and Montgomery Clift.

Thank you UCLA Film School for the excellent restoration of The Guns of Navarone.

This is Steve McQueen's breakout western classic after he established his genre chops in the TV cult favorite Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958) and after upstaging Yul Brenner in The Magnificent Seven (1960).

Much has been made of the age of the character discrepancy in Nevada Smith (1966), but McQueen must be given a pass here because John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart got away with it in John Ford's career-capping masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962).

The acting by the ensemble cast is outstanding, especially the tragic heroine Pilar played by Suzanne Pleshette. Men who were typecast as Hollywood villains, Karl Malden and Martin Landau, later became TV stars by playing good guys in The Streets of San Francisco (1972) and Mission: Impossible (1966), respectively.

McQueen made one more western, Tom Horn (1980), before his untimely death.

Hey film students, try looking at the bright side of this movie: it wasn't The Planet of the Apes.

The Andromeda Strain was a great novel and film and Michael Crichton (RIP) will be remembered for his ability to combine the scientific method with unbound imagination.

This movie is a great scientific detective story with a menacing Cold War theme: the destruction of all mankind. The lab methodology was very realistic and reminded me of my Microbiology 101 final in December of 1965 when I had two week to discover five unknown bacteria in the test tube. But I digress.

The good news is that the teaching of science is back in vogue, thank you Barack Obama.

Deliverance was a smash hit at the time and still travels well but the film makers made some mistakes that caused the deaths of several people who perhaps tried the stunts in this movie.

First, river runners would never take canoes down a river like this. You would take whitewater rafts or kayaks built for the rapids. Running a difficult river takes skill acquired by training, which these characters did not have.

Second, river running takes advanced planning and once on the river, scouting the rapids. River runners have to scout the tough rapids ahead of them before they run them. If the rapids are too difficult or unrunnable, the water craft have to be lined down the rapids with ropes.

Third, river runners need a shuttle waiting for them at the end of the trip to return them to their vehicles or they need people to shuttle their vehicles to the landing. You must have the utmost trust in the shuttle drivers and pay them well.

Watch Deliverance for the drama and suspense; watch The River Wild for white water realism.

Watch The Beguiled because it's a good place to begin when you study the femmes fatales in Clint Eastwood's filmography.

The smothering Gothic sexuality of The Beguiled has already been discussed. What everyone missed is the synchronized sexual physiology that occurs in a group of females living together, especially when a man is introduced into the group. They all become horny and then bitchy at the same time.

Femme fatal filmography for Clint Eastwood: Inger Stevens, Hang 'Em High, 1968; Jean Seberg, Paint Your Wagon, 1969; Shirley MacLaine, Two Mules for Sister Sara, 1970; Geralding Page, The Beguiled, 1971; Jessica Walters, Play Misty for Me, 1971; Sondra Locke, Sudden Impact, 1983; Genevieve Bujold, Tightrope, 1984; Marsha Mason, Heartbreak Ridge, 1986; Burnadette Peters, Pink Cadillac, 1989; and the best heart-breaker of all, Meryl Streep, The Bridges of Madison County, 1995.

Catch-22 is probable the pinnacle of success for most of this ensemble cast.

Joseph Heller's book was a satire on capitalism but the movie morphed into an anti-war sentiment thanks to Hollywood writers like Buck Henry.

Catch-22 is notable for two ground-breaking scenes in American cinema: The first was the shot of Col. Cathcart (Martin Balsam) on the toilet right in front of the camera with no apologies.

The director and editor did not prepare the audience for the shock and revulsion of the second shot, where Capt. Yossarian (Alan Arkin) leaves his pilot's seat to check on the bombardier.

When Yossarian lifts the wounded man's flight jacket, his guts literally fall out. As a result, more than one movie-goer lost his lunch, and his date, watching this film.

Should a twelve year old be exposed to the concept of nuclear apocalypse? This movie haunted me from 1960 until late March of 1974, when I was driving into San Francisco from the east early on Sunday morning.

There was a popular TV show at the time with Michael Douglas and Karl Maulden called The Streets of San Francisco. That's not the picture I had in my mind, it was something else, more sinister.

The streets were absolutely deserted: no tourists, no traffic, no trolleys. It was just like that movie On the Beach, when the submarine Swordfish sailed into San Francisco harbor to investigate a strange radio message. In that movie, the streets were totally void of life, too.

It wasn't until after noon that the tourist shops finally opened up on Fisherman's Wharf and an old man at a crab shack enlightened me. A perfect storm of urban terror and dysfunction had hit 'Frisco all at once.

1. The Zodiac Killer was looming large. 2. Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army were running amuck. 3. The bay sanitation workers were on strike (no fishing on the docks.) 4. Bay Area Rappid Transit (BART) workers were on strike.

So I decided to head back to the relative safety of Idaho, but I still had to run the nightmarish gauntlet of just-tripled gas prices (from 25 to 75 cents/gallon) and the new, oppressive double nickle speed limit.

But that's another IMDb movie review.

This movie (so far the Coen Bros. best effort) is all about face: Bill Macy's malleable mug, Frances McDormand's expressionless countenance and Steve Buscemi's gunshot gizzard.

But enough about this film's over-the-top action scenes. This is the anti-Dirty Harry cop film. There's no bluff, no bravado in McDormand's High Planes snow-drifter police chief, just the James Webb facts, ma'am.

In perhaps the greatest anti-climatic scene in late 20th century cinema, McDormand' chief discovers the bad guy disposing of his buddy (Steve Buscemi) in a stump grinder. When he tries to flee across the frozen lake, she drops him with one shot (to the right thigh) from her .357 mag service revolver.

This is not a classic shoot-em-up but it is the ultimate put-em-down.

This is one of the best sci-fi movies of all time because it successfully ties ancient Egypt and the pyramids to extra-terrestrials. You can trace the pedigree of Stargate straight back to 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the concept of intergalactic wormhole travel was introduced.

This movie is especially noteworthy because of Jaye Davidson, who appears for the second and last time in the movies. But after you've exposed yourself to the world (The Crying Game) and played the king of the universe (Stargate), what's left to do? Jaye took the money (one million dollars), his nipple rings and Ra's eye makeup and split.

Starman gets invited to Earth by playing the gold platter on Voyager I and gets blasted out of orbit by the evil Americans, who don't remember their gold-plated invitation! (Spoiler Alert: this premise also started Star Trek The Motion Picture) This is a great date movie, especially if it's your second time around. Let the kids watch, too. There's nothing here they haven't seen or heard already.

Add Jenny Hayden to your Karen Allen library. Remember her ass in Animal House? She looks great again as Marion Ravenwood in the latest Raiders movie.

The only boner in the movie is the dead-deer-on-the-hood scene. No real hunter would strap an animal carcass over a hot engine, especially if it wasn't gutted first! But I guess an ungutted deer is easier for Starman to revive.

Enjoy this movie knowing what kind of pie Starman really likes and remember, yellow means go really fast!

If you're gonna bust your cherry on cinematic sci-fi, where better to begin than Ray Bradbury's classic Fahrenheit 451. The theme of government thought control isn't new but Bradbury's treatment of book burning is.

One thing to watch for in the movie is the ubiquitous presence of spy cameras. Talk about prescience! Today spy-cams are every where, though not necessarily planted by the government.

The larger question Bradbury presents to us is how do we store knowledge, data, memories? As the movie shows, analog storage can be wiped out by fire. But if we choose to rely on digital storage as we do today, we are vulnerable to solar and cosmic storms that could destroy out data base and thus our civilization.

But that's another story and perhaps another classic sci-fi movie.

The hunting trip scene caught my eye because those mountains were not from Pennsylvania, and neither was the deer. But enough nit-picking.

The tag lines from The Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now come to mind here. "Madness, madness." "The horror, the horror."

In the Deer Hunter it's the irony, the irony because director Michael Cimino's story places American sons of Russian immigrants in a war where they are playing Russian roulette with their North Vietnamese captors who were being supported by...the Russians!

Search the world film library and you will not find a scene as intense as the Russian roulette scene in the bamboo guard tower above the river on the edge of the jungle. Do not call your education in the history of film complete until you have experienced this movie.

Nineteen sixty eight was a watershed year in American history and cinema. Kubrick and Clarke combined their geniuses to create a film that takes humans from the dawn of evolution to the edge of space and time.

Like many in my generation, I saw this movie when it played in a small college town, spring of '69. Word of the psychedelic show filled the theater and the ending left us all dazed and confused, some to this day.

Although much has been written about the film, I'll focus on the old-fashioned murder theme present from end to end. In the opening scene, an ape-man is empowered by his use of an antelope femur applied forcefully to his rival's forehead.

Flash forward to the Second Milleninm where, in the Jupiter-bound spaceship Discovery, a computer named HAL is systematically killing the crew. The lone survivor must out-smart and kill HAL; will this be history's first cybercide? If you've never seen 2001, the next showing of this classic-for-the-ages is February 5, 2009 on TCM. Tune in your new wall-mount wide-screen TV, turn off your cell phone, and enjoy the trip.

This movie oozes African post-colonial corporate intrigue. It was just what the cinema escapist needed after Christopher Walken's seminal role in The Deer Hunter, which bashed us all (well, Americans) with post-Viet Nam War guilt.

A not-so-modern thriller, The Dogs of War communicates quite nicely thank you without lap tops, cell phones, GPS's and spy satellites. The unseen communication device that lurks beneath the script is called a telegraph.

I'll pass on tapping out the Morse Code, but the give-away is the scene in prison where "Mr. Brown" is treated by the incarcerated Dr. Okoye before he (Brown) is deported. This "telegraphs" the surprise ending.

One more thing--if "Mr. Brown" was gonna get the crap kicked out of him, it should have been for a tryst with the dictator's mistress, not for a limp photograph he took of her in front of the dictator's palace.

Robert Duvall made two mistakes in making Assassination Tango. First, he hired the wrong director. So watch this some evening on the IFC channel and imagine Woody Allen behind the script and the camera.

Really, people, it has the classic Woody elements: an older, ratty-looking leading man; way younger hot women as romantic interests; and barely suppressed angst.

Oh, yeah...the second mistake: Duvall gives up the story in the title. So after viewing this film, compare it to his work and make up your own tag. How about Invasion of the Tango Snatchers?

One more observation: Manuela, the tango teacher, is played by Duvall's wife, Luciana Pedraza. Never direct your wife in a movie, or her ass might look big as it does in some tango shots.

This movie was made on location in the Boise Valley, Idaho , summer of '79. It's easy to see why Eastwood chose this location; it resembled small town USA in the '50s. Watching Bronco Billy today is a real time trip: where the villages of Eagle, Meridian and Nampa were 30 years ago, suburbia now sprawls to the horizon.

On the surface, Bronco Billy is light and corny, but dig deeper into the annals of Americana and discover that director Eastwood is shining a mirror of nostalgia on the pre-Disney TV days of Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers.

Some of the landmark film locations still stand, like the Ranch Club in Garden City with the iconic Palomino above the marque that announced "Merle Haggard". Sadly, the historic sandstone courthouse in Nampa was demolished. I entered the building on business and found the movie company was filming there but on a lunch break. Everyone had gone out back, gawking at the Hollywood stars. Eastwood's Bronco Billy Stetson was resting on a table, laden with a silver dollar hatband, tempting me to try it on. When I came back later it was gone, and so was the actor who played Bronco Billy.

See this movie for the first time on TCM for a primer on Hollywood studio film making in the post-war '50s. Get The Journals of Lewis and Clark edited by Bernard DeVoto for the best story you will ever read about the discovery of the American West, and it's all true. The book is in libraries and at Amizon.com. Second choice: Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose.

The stars of the movie (Fred MacMurray, Charlton Heston, Donna Reed) are Hollywood legends but their acting is as uninspired as the script. William Demarest as Sgt. Gass is the only believable character. The combat scenes are total fiction. Only one member of the Corps of Discovery died (of an illness)and only one Indian was shot, for trying to steal a horse from Lewis one night in Monatana on the return trip.

As others have reported, the love story is contrived but remains a fascination in Western romance novels about Sacajawea. The joke is on the film makers because The Journals ooze sex between the men of the Corps and women of some of the tribes. Lewis was the medic and half of his medicine it seems was used to treat the men suffering from venereal diseases.

Read the book; maybe someday Hollywood will make the movie.

Note to reviewers: Use of the term "squaw" has been politically incorrect for some time.