Robert Mitchum had many talents, actor, writer, poet, musician, drinker, but perhaps the most surprising was vocal mimic. In films such as Foreign Intrigue (1956) and Fire Down Below (1957) he affected perfect French and Trinidadian accents - he even recorded his own Calypso album in authentic Caribbean patois. For The Night Fighters Bob tried out his Irish brogue for the first time - later put to fine use in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1971) - as an Irish Republican Army recruit who learns the hard way that love and violence can only lead to tragedy. The last of three films produced by his own company including Thunder Road (1958) and The Wonderful Country (1959), Mitchum hired his One Minute to Zero (1952) director Tay Garnett to helm this made-in Ireland production. The film's failure to connect with audiences put the kibosh on Bob's future as actor-producer. Regardless, the casting, direction, and design of the film lend it a remarkable authenticity let down only by the cliched storyline. A quality effort that doesn't deserve its obscurity.
One of a pair of troubled films that Bob made with Dick Fleischer (see also His Kind of Woman), Bandido was written by Earl Felton (20000 Leagues Under The Sea) and originally based on a story about Pancho Villa. Plagued by production delays, script re-writes, and Mitchum's false arrest on location in Mexico for marijuana possession, this widescreen Western is better than it has any right to be, no doubt largely attributable to the unflappable skill of Fleischer, a veteran of stylish low budget noirs (The Narrow Margin, Armored Car Robbery). This time Mitchum is selling his skills as a soldier of fortune south of the border and getting entangled in the Mexican Revolution, very similar to the role he would play many years later in Villa Rides (1968). Cast as Bob's object of desire, forgotten German beauty Ursula Thiess (Bengal Brigade) may be a lovely asset but it's the film's intense action and exotic locations that keep the audience engaged. A United Artists release that has shockingly never been officially available on any home video format.
Big Bob in 3 Dimensions! A rare foray by RKO into the 3-D craze of the Fifties resulted in this soleil noir which featured Jack Palance, fresh from Shane (1953), polishing his now well established villainous credentials. Still young at age 30 Bob's smoldering co-star Linda Darnell was already in a career down turn which would see her largely retreat to Television in a few short years. Mitchum may have been marking time as he finished this last film in his RKO contract with eccentric boss Howard Hughes, but cast as a depressed prize fighter one would never know, particularly given Bob's well-disguised acting professionalism. At the time there were few men who could pose a credible threat to Mitchum onscreen and Palance was one of them, which if nothing else, manages to rescue this potboiler from obscurity. Picturesque Mexican locations also help and the 3-D climax in dangling cable cars provides vertigo inducing thrills. A satisfying trip south of the border that should get a proper restoration on Blu-ray soon.
Even a century after his birth, Robert Mitchum remains one of cinema's all-time greatest stars. His uniquely hard-boiled screen persona effortlessly radiated both detachment and danger. A fluently instinctive performer, who was as comfortable playing lugubrious losers, as he was handsome heroes. He is an actor always worth watching, no matter how mediocre the production. My extensive collection of his films is an obsessive work-in-progress. The following are the most wanted and unavailable titles of his filmography still out of reach in North America on DVD or BLU-RAY:
THE LUSTY MEN (1952: Dir. Nicholas Ray)
Robert Mitchum did some surprisingly strong work in his early career under contract to Howard Hughes at RKO Studios. Having mostly collaborated with journeymen or rookie directors, Mitchum had yet to experience the dominant vision of true auteur, until he met Nicholas Ray. Ray was a filmmaker fascinated by the outsider. Obsessed with individualists, his cinematic legacy left us with some of the most memorable rebels of all-time (They Live By Night, In A Lonely Place, Rebel Without A Cause). Their first meeting came when director Josef Von Sternberg was fired from the film Macao (1952) and Ray was brought in to complete it. Demonstrating a largely hidden writing talent, Mitchum even collaborated on a revision of the largely nonsensical screenplay. Following that fruitful partnership they quickly went into production on The Lusty Men, a contemporary Western drama that contains the quintessential Mitchum protagonist. As broken down rodeo rider Jeff McCloud, Bob gets to play all the melancholy notes using his perfect physical instrument. With his broad barrel chest, brooding bedroom eyes, graceful gait, and laconic manner, Mitchum oozes animal magnetism from every pore. Mindful of his sexy leading man, Ray keeps all of the erotic undercurrents at a rolling boil as fiery Susan Hayward and folksy Arthur Kennedy spice up the story's tragic love triangle. One of Bob's best and a criminal omission on Blu-ray.
As he approached his 53rd year Charlton Heston was having one of the most commercially successful periods of his career, but even he must have known it was the spectacle of disaster that had lured audiences to Airport 1975, and Earthquake, rather than his aging star persona. It wasn't just his hairpiece that was getting less convincing, so were his days as a romantic lead. Realizing this, Heston embraced his middle age by segueing into mostly father figure and supporting character roles. 1976 would be the tipping point and a very busy year for him, having already starred in two films opposite James Coburn, the brutal Western The Last Hard Men, followed by the large cast WWII epic Midway. Continuing his connection with Universal Pictures, Heston accepted an offer to play the smaller yet pivotal role of the Los Angeles Police Captain dealing with a lone gunman at a championship football game in the LA Coliseum. Written and produced by the same team who had previously done the made-for-TV docudrama 21 Hours at Munich about the Israeli hostage incident at the 1972 Olympics, this was the third in a sniper film cycle following Targets (1968), and The Deadly Tower (1975), both inspired by the 1966 Charles Whitman shootings in Texas. Director Larry Peerce, whose New York Subway hostage thriller The Incident (1967) is a textbook example in low budget suspense film-making, expertly ratchets up the tension as a random collection of football fans inexorably march towards their tragic fate. Peerce wisely insisted, over studio protestations, that the killer remain both unknown and unknowable, mostly depicted as an anonymous series of fidgeting hands, point of view camera shots and obscured angles. This puts the audience in an exceptionally uncomfortable position, accentuating the anxiety of its chilling terrorist scenario. Composer Charles Fox doubles down on the dread with an eerie score that at times channels the oeuvre of Jerry Goldsmith, but appropriately when the violence erupts, the music becomes unnervingly absent save for the startling crack of a rifle being fired. The irresistibly intense John Cassavetes co-stars as the saturnine S.W.A.T. team leader whose appetite for deadly retribution contrasts with the more reasoned response of Heston's cop, an exchange given added irony by Chuck's future real-life appointment as president of the NRA. With its shocking R-rated bloodletting the film was a stand-out among the more family friendly horrors of most of its genre, perhaps being responsible for a cool reception at the box office. Audiences were just not interested in witnessing a bloodbath and mob panic that had no discernible entertainment value other than pure terror. Dismissed at the time as a fear-mongering exercise in cinematic ballyhoo, Two Minute Warning can be especially disconcerting for post 9-11 viewers whose commonplace experience with murderous rampages have only increased in the intervening decades.
BLU-RAY
"An Event" indeed. The one two punch of Airport 1975 and Earthquake would make 1974 the biggest box office year of Charlton Heston's career. Once again hitching his wagon to another of executive producer Jennings Lang's disaster film juggernauts, Heston, after a crucial amelioration of his character's infidelity in the shooting script, delivered his expected gravitas and physical prowess in the role of beleaguered engineer Stewart Graff. He is joined by a carefully chosen array of low wattage stars including: Ava Gardner, his middle-aged former co-star from 55 Days at Peking (1963), Quebecoise ingenue Genevieve Bujold (Anne of the Thousand Days), Canadian cowboy Lorne Greene (Bonanza), Soul cinema superstar Richard Roundtree (Shaft) and the ubiquitous George Kennedy (Airport). Lang and producer/director Mark Robson knew that spectacle was the main attraction for an audience gorged on destruction and carnage, so they decided to put cinema patrons right on the fault line itself. Their invention was the sound system "Sensurround" a low frequency extended-range bass noise generator that could simulate the vibrations of an actual earthquake. Newly installed in dozens of cinemas across North America, this unique sensory experience left audiences both shaken and stirred by a genuine visceral reaction to the terrifying tremors depicted on screen. The script, originally conceived by Mario The Godfather Puzo and revised by neophyte screenwriter George Fox, is cleverly constructed to take advantage of numerous picturesque Los Angeles locations while at the same time thriftily staging large scale physical effects within the safety zone of the studio backlot. The most unsung member of the creative team however was matte artist Albert Whitlock, a genius with a paint brush on glass. His background depictions of downtown LA convincingly reduced to ruins, gave the film an essential sense of scale and apocalyptic threat. Not since the 1950s, when 3D and Cinerama were the dominating cinema gimmicks, had Hollywood created such a mercenary thrill ride motion picture, blatantly sacrificing character, dialogue and plot on the altar of cataclysm. Sensurround was subsequently used by Universal Pictures for only three more films: Midway (1976) also starring Heston, Rollercoaster (1977), and Battlestar Galactica (1978), all to diminishing effect. Judged purely by its gross profits, Earthquake would be the peak of the disaster film cycle and Charlton Heston now its undisputed star attraction. Two more films would complete his quintet of catastrophe, but they would take the genre into new and different directions, not always where the public wished to follow. BLU-RAY
Approaching middle age and still looking for another hit film Charlton Heston accepted an offer to star in Universal Pictures's rather unimaginatively entitled sequel Airport 1975. As was his practice, Heston intensely researched the role of an airline pilot who has to instruct his airline stewardess girlfriend (Karen Black) on how to land a 747 airplane by herself when most of the cabin crew have been killed after colliding with a small aircraft. In order to bolster the technical credibility of this seemingly preposterous plot, Heston, utilizing the only jumbo jet simulator in America, tested the veracity of the story-line by simulating the exact circumstances of the film, successfully talking down a real-life air hostess to a safe landing. Apart from Black who has the meatiest of the main roles, Heston gets little support from a largely boring cast of TV faces (Roy Thinnes, Sid Caesar, Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), a trendy pop singer (Helen Reddy), and faded film stars of the golden era (Myrna Loy, Gloria Swanson, Dana Andrews). Shining like a beacon of good will, only George Kennedy, reprising his memorably gregarious Airport character Joe Patroni, brings any genuine vitality to the drab dialogue. Lazily directed by Jack Smight (Harper), Airport 1975 looks and feels like a typical TV movie of the week from that era, no doubt due to the influence of its producer Jennings Lang, a man credited with inventing the made-for-tv movie format in the 1960s. Not surprisingly, the crew consisted largely of veterans from episodic television including cinematographer Philip Lathrop (Peter Gunn), composer John Cacavas (Kojak), writer Don Ingalls (Have Gun-Will Travel), producer William Frye (Thriller) and even Smight himself (McCloud). Yet I can't help but acknowledge that Airport 1975 still works as trashy, vicarious cinematic junkfood. Even after being mercilessly spoofed by the film Airplane (1980), the situation of a passenger aircraft in jeopardy is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser and the entire production would have to be a complete unprofessional mess in order to suppress the concept's sheer entertainment value. Audiences lapped it up, becoming one of the year's top money earners and establishing Heston's reputation as a disaster film talisman. However, the big one was just around corner.
BLU-RAY & DVD
For film-goers of my generation Charlton Heston wasn't Moses, or Ben Hur, or even Michelangelo. For children of the Seventies, he was the stalwart hero of a series of five "disaster" movies that defined the people-in-jeopardy genre. Heston's cinematic fame falls into three cycles of big screen success. His initial stardom began in 1956 with The Ten Commandments, and flourished in the late 1950s and 1960s with such grandiose epics as: The Buccaneer (1958), Ben Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963), The War Lord (1965), Khartoum (1966), Heston then helped rejuvenate the Science Fiction genre withthe box-office blockbuster The Planet of the Apes (1968). He followed this with a popular trio of dystopian tales; a shockingly nihilist sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the progressively biracial The OmegaMan (1971) and a prescient forewarning of ecological devastation in Soylent Green (1973). Between these years Heston had a run of films that he produced, starred in, and/or directed that were notable flops including: Counterpoint (1967), Number One (1969), Julius Caesar (1970), The Hawaiians (1970) and Antony and Cleopatra (1972). The exception during this period was Skyjacked, a thriller inspired by the mega-success of the film Airport (1970). As producer and developer of the project, Heston helped to fine tune the disaster genre as a trendy Seventies vehicle for both up and coming young performers, and old time stars alike. According to historical statistics between the years 1961 and 1973 nearly 160 airplane hijackings occurred on American soil. Universal Pictures keen to exploit this deadly epidemic, bought the rights to Arthur Hailey's bestselling novel Airport, which featured a disturbed unemployed airline passenger trying to blow himself for the insurance money. Audiences loved it and after grossing ten times its budget, the Academy nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar- it didn't win. Heston and his producing partner Walter Seltzer, mindful of this potential box office bonanza, hired television writer Stanley R. Greenberg to adapt David Harper's 1970 novel Hijacked for the big screen, with MGM securing distribution. To realize the film visually, British director John Guillerman was hired on account of the technical craftsmanship he brought to The Blue Max (1966), where he had vividly recreated the perilous existence of WWI aviation aces. In Skyjacked, Guillerman made masterful use of an actual Boeing 707, filming all of the scenes on a real interior flight deck and passenger compartment, matched by authentic exterior in-flight footage. This dedication to realism forced cinematographer Harry Stradling Jr. (Little Big Man) to employ an inventive shooting style, one that communicates the claustrophobia of the passengers while providing the audience with a kinetic atmosphere where the action can unfold. Another ace-in-the-hole was editor Robert Swink who had previously cut two other famous single location films The Narrow Margin (1952) and The Desperate Hours (1955). Swink's lean editing ratchets up the tension as the mystery of the hijacker's identity is methodically teased to a tense viewer. As the plagued pilot Heston anchors the film with his inimitable commanding presence. Although deprived of any strong character moments, he does share one emotional flashback with stewardess Yvette Mimieux, who had played his little sister a decade earlier in Diamond Head (1962). The most memorable portrayal in the film is from James Brolin as the psychotic soldier who demands to be flown to the U.S.S.R.. Totally convincing in a challenging role of emotional extremes, he embodies the duality of a damaged veteran, the eager to please enlisted man and the frustrated fury of someone who has witnessed the senseless brutality of war. Other notable performances are provided by teen star Susan Dey in her feature debut, mountainous football player Rosie Grier as a jazz cellist (?!), Canadian Walter Pidgeon believably cast as a U.S. Senator, and the always elegant Jeanne Crain in her farewell film role. The care with which Heston and Seltzer lavished on the production certainly paid off, Skyjacked was MGM's second higher grosser of the year and Heston's bankability was again assured. He and Seltzer would collaborate on two further projects, one a hit, the other a miss: Soylent Green, also written by Greenberg, and a violent western The Last Hard Men (1976) adapted from the novel by Brian Garfield (Death Wish). When it was finally issued on DVD, Skyjacked was marketed as a "Camp Classic". Dated fashions notwithstanding, nothing could be further from the truth. In an age where terrorism is a near daily occurrence, stories such as these are a valuable reminder of the selfless courage individuals in danger demonstrate toward each other. Charlton Heston would take this message to heart as he embarked on a series of films exploring this theme in various contexts. DVD REGION 1
When an esteemed film-maker dies my first instinct is to research his or her filmography for the orphaned works in their curriculum vitae. These are the forgotten and forlorn films that have for no apparent reason, been overlooked by the public and cognoscenti alike. Jonathan Demme will forever be remembered as the director of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Philadelphia (1992). However many years prior, Demme, who had previously been toiling away on drive-in exploitation fare, made one of his most satisfying early efforts, the Hitchcock inspired spy thriller Last Embrace. Unlike the contemporaneous work of Brian DePalma, Demme was not employing the genre in order to exercise his stylistic visual chops, rather he used the suspense form as a template to create a psychologically complex world for his protagonist, a practice he would later refine in Something Wild (1987), The Silence of the Lambs, Beloved (1998), and most recently The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Roy Scheider (Jaws) is the star of Last Embrace and as he demonstrated throughout his career, his is a screen charisma based on a uniquely vulnerable masculinity. One that could be both resolute and conflicted, sometimes within same scene. Playing these character traits to full effect, Demme forces Scheider's burnt-out secret agent through a gauntlet of arcane clues, paranoid attacks, and sexual duplicity nearly destroying his faith in humanity. In spite of the odds the viewer never doubts Roy's ingenuity for survival, much as he proved when outwitting the cinema's most famous ocean predator. Demme's eye for an eccentric supporting cast lends additional gravitas to the panicky proceedings, particularly the choice of two hot young actors: John Glover (Annie Hall) and Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter), destined to dominate both stage and screen in the years to come. On the technical side, Demme was fortuitously re-united with cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, with whom he had previously collaborated on the Roger Corman-produced prison pic Caged Heat (1974). Their intuitive teaming would continue for most of their careers, but for this, their second joint effort, Fujimoto shot with a slightly diffused look that reflected the unease of the Scheider's shady world, expertly utilizing slow-motion dissolves to tease the tension and accentuate the anxiety. It all culminates in a melodramatic climax at Niagara Falls, abetted by a classically grandiose music score composed by Hitchcock alum Miklos Rosza (Spellbound). Released in early May of 1979 Last Embrace, was a disappointing failure at the box office, ironically followed by a similar paranoid thriller, William Richert's Winter Kills (see my blog here: http://motionpicturepredilections.blogspot.ca/2015/05/film-failures-i-refuse-to-abandon-part.html)which opened unsuccessfully a week later. They both were devoured by the juggernaut of Ridley Scott's Alien which burst onto screens a week after that. Undaunted, Demme turned a much talked about Bo Goldman script into the cult hit Melvin and Howard (1980) garnering multiple Oscar wins and major studio interest in its still-young director. His career was finally on track, and now as one looks back upon his eclectic body of work in both narrative and documentary films, it is evident that Jonathan Demme wrote his own epitaph in light and shadow, as a true original. BLU-RAY
In the 1980s James Woods was arguably the most exciting American actor working in film and televsion. I followed his career religiously: Videodrome (1983), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Joshua Then and Now (1985) Salvador (1986), Best Seller (1987), Cop (1988), True Believer (1989). I saw them all. When the 1990s came along he seemed to stumble with miscast duds like 1992's Straight Talk (as Dolly Parton's love interest?). He finally put his career back on track with a trio of real-life legal dramas made-for-cable: Citizen Cohn (1992), Indictment:The McMartin Trial(1995)and Dirty Pictures (2000). Having just revisited Citizen Cohn, I was once again reminded that nobody plays a more compelling egomaniac than James Woods. As corrupt counsel to Joe McCarthy's Commie witch hunt hearings, Woods devours the role of Roy Cohn as if it were the last steak dinner of a man on death row. Moral turpitude oozes from every pore of his portrayal. Even his harrowing death from AIDS does little to engender any sympathy for a man who ruined countless lives for his own self-aggrandizement. In our now progressive era of LGBTQ rights, Cohn's denial of his own homosexuality as well as his blackmailing of closeted public figures provides a disturbing history lesson for Donald Trump's America. Later in life Cohn became a mentor to the young Trump, educating him in the ways of malicious threats and legal chicanery. Sadly no reference is made to his Trump ties, instead the audience is enlightened as to Cohn's kinship with the hollowed-out hulk of Joe Don Baker's Senator McCarthy and the sedentarily sleazy J. Edgar Hoover played by Pat Hingle. Special mention should also be made to Frederic Forrest, who in an amusing interrogation scene briefly reprises his laconic Dashiell Hammett performance from Francis Coppola's ill-fated production of Hammett (1982). Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, Citizen Cohn remains an uncompromising drama written by David Franzoni (Gladiator), directed by Frank Pierson (Dog Day Afternoon), and fueled by Woods' infectious go-for-broke dynamism. Ironically, Woods has recently claimed that his right wing politics have hampered his career in Hollywood so we have been deprived of his fiery presence in recent years. I for one, hope that he will get another meaningful chance to dazzle us with his rare talent. DVD REGION 1
