ACTION HEROES WHO DELIGHT ME: Errol Flynn

THE ADVENTURES OF DON JUAN (1948: Dir. Vincent Sherman)

Seven years ago I wrote a blog entitled Where Have All The Heroes Gone? in which I praised the traditional heroes of an earlier era whose selfless acts bore none of the cynicism of our selfish post-millenial age. With most screens now officially dominated either by the adolescent antics of  "super-heroes" or the machine gun marauding of weary, middle-aged "expendables", the old joy of light comedy action seems like a foreign language to a generation raised on violent video games and the morbid fascination of crime scene corpses.  I have always believed that humour is a vital component to all films, and as a fan of cinematic athleticism, I can think of no better actor who embodies both of these attributes better than Errol Flynn. Bursting onto the screen with the swashbuckling earnestness of Captain Blood (1935), the dashing Tasmanian thrusted himself into the pantheon of classic movie heroes. With the assistance of Belgian fencing master Fred Cavens, Flynn developed his superior skills with a sword, which combined with a devil-may-care charm and matinee idol looks made him the greatest action star of his day. Perhaps the most important aspect of his screen persona is his pure joie de vivre, an overpowering life force energy that envelopes the viewer in its sureness of purpose. Any actor can dexterously wield a blade or shoot an arrow, but Flynn's grin makes it fun in a uniquely satisfying way, as if we the audience are partaking in the exhilarating hijinks ourselves. I still find myself almost immediately drawn into the rousing action of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) due to the infectiousness of Flynn's zestfully witty performance. His unparalleled run of escapist entertainments continued unabated for nearly a decade after Captain Blood had made him a star overnight, but it wasn't until after a fallow period of dramas during WWII, that Flynn returned to make his testament film, The Adventures of Don Juan. It would be a rollicking swashbuckler in the quintessential Flynn style, this time taking full satirical advantage of the aging star's real-life reputation as a notorious lothario. Directed by veteran Warner Bros. craftsman Vincent Sherman (Mr Skeffington), Don Juan is a fascinating and enjoyable hybrid film in the Flynn canon, full of self-deprecating jokes, electrifying action, and melancholy romance. Flynn, still able to perform much of his own swordsmanship, owns the screen, seeding little ground to his flavourful supporting cast, including Errol's jovial cinematic sidekick Alan Hale, the oily villainy of Robert Douglas and the luscious pulchritude of Viveca Lindfors. Its all topped off with composer Max Steiner's playfully Spanish score, pushing the already exciting action sequences into exuberant overdrive. Maybe the film's energy should be credited to Sherman, a man who nearing his 100th birthday can be heard still waxing excitedly about his and Flynn's achievement on the DVD commentary track, six decades later!  DVD REGION 1 & 2

PRINTER'S INK PROTAGONISTS Part Two

DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968: Dir. Mario Bava)

When the American counterculture came into full-bloom during the late Sixties, there were very few cinematic heroes for disaffected youth to embrace. Most were government agents or other guardians of the status quo. This was an era before anti-heroes dominated the mainstream, with the closest Hollywood approximation being Harper, an irreverent gum-chewing private eye played by Paul Newman ( Hud, Hombre) in the hippest of his Sixties "H" roles. By 1967, the seeds of cultural and political revolution were also being sown in France and Italy, where a generation of teenagers grew up with comic book "heroes" whose behavior and mores represented an enviable anarchistic hedonism that fulfilled their now adult yearnings for a new world order. Many of these lawless protagonists were loosely based on the fictional template of the seminal French super-thief Arsene Lupin, created in 1902 and later the inspiration for such nefarious continental characters as Fantomas and Diabolik. Parisian arch villain Fantomas, having been around since 1911, was adapted for the screen many times, including a trio of films starting in 1964 that softened the dark psychopathy of its titular master of disguise, in favor of a more farcical approach. The knife-wielding Diabolik was the Italian anti-hero equivalent, eschewing Fantomas' ruthless power-hungry killing of innocent civilians. Instead, Diabolik confined his thieving ways to a greedy pursuit of personal wealth, aided by his gorgeous paramour Eva Kant. Created in 1962 by the Guisanni sisters, he first appeared in digest-sized monthlies or fumetti, printed in a black and white format well-suited to the noir atmosphere of his adventures. After an aborted attempt at bringing these characters to the screen in the mid-Sixties starring French actor Jean Sorel and Italian actress Elsa Martinelli, the rights were subsequently acquired by flamboyant producer Dino De Laurentiis who immediately hired ace genre director Mario Bava, an acknowledged maestro of  in-camera special effects. De Laurentiis chose as his leads, lanky American actor John Philip Law and petite French superstar Catherine Deneuve, but personalities clashed early on, so Deneuve was quickly replaced by statuesque Austrian cult actress Marisa Mell. With the characters' chemistry now rightfully restored, the resultant evidence was immediately apparent from their very first lovingly erotic embrace, when Law, breathtaking as Diabolik emerges from his flash sports car clad in a black head-to-toe skin tight rubber suit, to greet Mell, ultra sexy in her go-go boots and diaphanous orange mini dress. Glowing from their simultaneous off-screen affair, these two striking stars effortlessly draw focus in every scene, leaving Bava alone to dazzle the audience with his astonishingly substantive foreground miniatures and deceptive glass matte backgrounds. Having been one of Italy's premier cinematographers, he also took pains to suggest the visual two dimensionality of the original fumetti by dynamically employing wide angle lenses and the dreamlike layering of  rear projection.  Of course the comic book's original muted tones had no place in a Sixties romp, so Bava fully embraced the film's vivid colour scheme, particularly emphasizing a gold motif to symbolize the avarice of his doomed hero. Given its dazzling production design, one would imagine that Danger: Diabolik must have cost a comparative fortune. It was after all budgeted at the large sum of nearly 3 million dollars, however Bava, accustomed to achieving miracles on low budgets, shockingly completed the entire film for a measly $400 000 dollars. A sequel was proposed using the remaining funds, but Bava declined, having felt that the scrutiny he had endured as a director on such a high profile project was ultimately not worth the extra luxuries of production that were afforded to him. The film's resulting success both financially and artistically was further underscored when producer De Laurentiis followed up Danger: Diabolik with the 9 million dollar comic book adaptation Barbarella, once again starring John Philip Law. A bloated, static, and sometimes cheap looking fantasy, it has little of the joie de vivre of Bava's film and today is mostly remembered as an ambitious gamble by provocative filmmaker Roger Vadim (Blood and Roses), featuring his then-wife Jane Fonda in an unseemly salacious role. Signalling the end of a cycle, it would be ten more years before Richard Donner's Superman finally gave dramatic credibility to comic book heroes, initiating a blockbuster legacy that has irrevocably altered the entire Hollywood filmmaking model, seemingly forever. DVD REGION 1 & 2

PRINTER'S INK PROTAGONISTS Part One

MODESTY BLAISE (1966: Dir. Joseph Losey)

As hard as it is believe, films based on comic books and strips were once considered the lowest form of big screen entertainment. Confined to cliffhanger movie serials, or low budget B-films, these adaptations of superhero and science fiction properties such as Buck Rogers, Captain Marvel, and Dick Tracy, were considered basic fodder sold to kids en masse for their Saturday afternoon's amusement. Written and directed with a perfunctory enthusiasm for the genre, they were disposable delights for youngsters reared during the turbulent WWII years. When television arrived in the post war period these heroes migrated to the small screen where the new medium became an electronic babysitter for a generation of baby boomers. It didn't take long for heroes such as Superman, The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon to excite the imaginations of television's captive audience. This remained the norm for most of the next decade with the exceptions being Superman and the Mole-Men (1951) and Batman (1966), both big screen spin-offs of their popular TV series. In fact, it would be the Europeans who would finally break the stigma for cinematic superheroes. In the U.K.and the rest of Europe there had been a tradition of adult comic strips produced for their many newspapers, even James Bond enjoyed a successful run in the dailies. Writer Peter O'Donnell began his career scripting comic strips, having cut his teeth adapting Dr. No for the Daily Express, and later creating the most famous illustrated female heroine ever to appear in print, Modesty Blaise. The eponymously named Evening Standard strip began in 1963 and ran virtually uninterrupted for 38 years with O'Donnell simultaneously publishing Modesty Blaise novels and short stories during that time. It had all started when O'Donnell was hired to convert a rejected first draft screenplay of a Modesty Blaise feature, into a tie-in book, marketed to promote the film version, thus inaugurating his career as a novelist. Although originally the intent of producer Joseph Janni, director Joseph Losey (These Are The Damned, Accident) had little use for a female James Bond, instead he wanted to utilize the character's exploits as a hook on which to hang a collection of satirical commentaries, an idea totally antithetical in tone to O'Donnell's original hard boiled pulp aspirations. What resulted was an amusing hodgepodge of genre and tone, mixing slapstick, surrealism, and social satire in an emblematic cocktail of psychedelic Sixties mod. Starring as Modesty, a mysterious criminal adventurer recruited by the British Secret Service, was sensuous siren Monica Vitti, the Italian IT Girl of the era thanks to her longstanding artistic and romantic relationship with auteur filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni ( L'Avventura, Red Desert). Sharing in this dangerous assignment is her Cockney sidekick Willie Garvin portrayed by Terence Stamp, whose screen charisma more than makes up for his less than stellar singing voice featured in the musical numbers. In the original strip Garvin was modelled by artist Jim Holdaway after the then young stage actor Michael Caine, coincidentally Stamp's own roommate at the time. Our two fashionable heroes, prone to hair and costume changes sometimes in the middle of a scene, are well-matched by the effete blonde-wigged villainy of diamond smuggler Dirk Bogarde, in the most playfully delicious of the film's many arch performances. Losey always decried the result, perhaps due to an arduous production hampered by constant script rewrites, and a self-conscious leading lady who forbade profile shots of her Roman nose. However despite such travails, its loyal cult still thrives to this day, embracing the film's provocative production design, sybaritic cinematography and snappy score, a campy concoction well represented by the indelible poster art of Bob Peak. DVD & BLU-RAY

THOSE SUPERNATURAL SEVENTIES Part Two

MAN ON A SWING (1974: Dir. Frank Perry)

When I was young in the Seventies, the world seemed obsessed with the supernatural. Television shows such as: In Search Of.., Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and That's Incredible dominated the ratings. The paperback racks of my local drugstore were filled with books like Chariots of the Gods?, The Bermuda Triangle, The Amityville Horror, and The World Almanac Book of the Strange, and my hometown cinemas were always showing genre films about UFOs, Bigfoot, Telekinesis, Reincarnation, and Demonic Possession drawing crowds of people willing to explore the unknown. Clairvoyance was a particular interest of mine. To me, the idea of being able to communicate with spirits, sense the history of inanimate objects, and read the minds of others in distress, was both a thrilling and frightening possibility. Director Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife) must have also felt the same way, having brought to the screen in 1974 one of the most credible depictions of a clairvoyant ever, in Man On A Swing. As personified by the recent Oscar Winner for Cabaret Joel Grey, self-proclaimed psychic Franklin Wills is an unnerving study in narcissism and neurosis. A man who is convinced that his extra-sensory abilities can help skeptical police chief Cliff Robertson solve a small-town sex murder. Based on a true story, the screenplay by David Zelag Goodman (Straw Dogs, Farewell My Lovely) expertly draws the audience into the investigation as Robertson becomes more and convinced that Grey's supposed "powers" are merely a smoke-screen for his direct involvement in the crime. Director Perry had a reputation for getting courageous performances from neophyte talents as well as established Hollywood stars, and with this offbeat genre exercise, he continued his near perfect string of psychological character studies. At first it seems as if Grey has the more flamboyant role, physically acting out his violent "visions" in front of an audience of cynical cops, but as the mystery deepens, Robertson rises to the emotional challenge of his role, as a man whose beliefs and even sanity, are put to the test. The result is a disturbingly enigmatic whodunit and although some viewers are left unsatisfied, its opaque atmosphere only serves to rekindle my fond memories of an era before the mysteries of the paranormal were replaced in the public's imagination by the explainable wonders of technology. DVD REGION 1

THOSE SUPERNATURAL SEVENTIES Part One

THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973: Dir. John Hough)

Western society has always been fascinated by the paranormal, particularly as a reflection of the powerlessness felt during certain times of war and civil unrest. In cinema, as with the rest of the culture, the late Sixties and Seventies were a very fertile period of fascination with the supernatural. Horror cinema in particular entered a new maturity with the release of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), a rare mainstream horror hit, purposefully conceived for contemporary adult audiences. Still recovering from the twin tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and fearing an escalation of the war in Vietnam, North American cinema-goers flocked to escapist entertainment, making blockbusters out of such ground-breaking genre classics as The Planet of the Apes (1968) and 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968). Most horror films however, were still trapped in a gothic style fostered by filmmakers such as Roger Corman, and Britain's Hammer Films. Unlike those traditionalists, Polanski dared to tell a hip urban story of the supernatural that would ultimately sow the sensational seeds of a Seventies sci-fi and horror boom shrouded by Watergate paranoia and Middle-East conflict. Under the growing influence of a youth culture obsessed by free love and the occult, movies had finally started to relax their parochial self-censorship, thus allowing a film such as The Exorcist (1973) to be made, despite explicit content which would have prevented it from even being considered for production only a few years before. Veteran fantasy author and screenwriter Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man) witnessed these changing winds, so when he came to write his sexually provocative horror novel Hell House in 1971, he took advantage of this new-found freedom. As with most authors, Matheson had experienced both good and bad times adapting his literary works for Hollywood, but he was well aware that controversial material sometimes had to be excised or toned-down for mass consumption. With box-office in mind, he turned out a PG-rated screenplay of his own R-rated novel, re-titled The Legend of Hell House, the story of the Belasco estate in Maine, with the reputation of being "the Mount Everest of haunted houses". For more traditional cinematic purposes, Matheson moved the novel's stately mansion to England, but the book's four ghost-hunting protagonists, a renowned para-psychologist (Clive Revill), his wife (Gayle Hunnicutt), and two spiritual mediums (Roddy McDowall & Pamela Franklin) remain largely unchanged. British director John Hough, who had cut his cinematic horror teeth on Hammer's last great vampire film Twins of Evil (1971), brings an appropriately sober eye to the potentially baroque paranormal atmosphere. The story unfolds in a visual and editing style that approximates realistic rhythms and lighting, without sacrificing any of the screenplay's carefully constructed sequences of suspense and terror. Hough even eschews a conventional film score, choosing instead to use sound effects and aural environments to convey the manor's macabre mileu. Although the novel featured a more graphically debauched incubus, Matheson's adaptation possesses a sufficient number of genuinely disturbing scenes, enough to convince audiences at the time that a perverted evil was manifesting itself amongst the vulnerable cast of characters. Although a modest success in America, it was unfortunately preceded in the U.K. by The Stone Tape (1972), a memorably harrowing television film with a spookily similar premise. Hough would later re-visit the haunted house genre with the disastrous Walt Disney production The Watcher In The Woods (1980), a film compromised by a re-shot vague ending intended to make it more palatable for family audiences. With The Legend of Hell House Hough and Matheson experienced no such pressures, for they knew what it takes to frighten a willing audience, and the result is a small marvel of tasteful terror. DVD & BLU-RAY

AUSTRALIAN ACTION MAN Part Two

THE THIRTY NINE STEPS (1978: Dir. Don Sharp)

Now well at home in the genre, director Don Sharp embarked on a third excursion into espionage, this time a loyal adaptation of John Buchan's famous novel previously brought to the screen (in bastardized form) by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935 and Ralph Thomas in 1959. Starring Robert Powell (television's Jesus of Nazareth) as Richard Hannay, and supported by a who's who of British talent including, David Warner, Eric Porter and Karen Dotrice, The Thirty Nine Steps is a model of olde fashioned suspense. Starting in 1914 and detailing the demise of paranoid British secret agent Scudder, played with school-boy enthusiasm by Sir John Mills, the film breathlessly keeps pace with Hannay, Buchan's initially unwilling hero, as he is relentlessly pursued across Great Britain by a pair of devious Prussian assassins. Powell, who possesses some of the gaunt intensity and wiry physicality of a young Peter Cushing, makes for a believably intrepid protagonist and is well-matched by the calculated upper-class villainy of Warner's Lord Appleton. Together with his editor Eric Boyd-Perkins and cinematographer John Coquillon, Sharp forcefully brings to life the threatening days before The Great War, when precarious politics dictated the fate of nations. Ironically, each cinematic version of the novel preceded a corresponding threat to world order : Hitchcock's presaging WWII, Thomas's auguring the tense era of The Cuban Missile Crisis, and Sharp's foreshadowing Reagan/Thatcher's nuclear brinkmanship of the early Eighties. The Thirty Nine Steps was also the first of a production slate of spy thrillers from the dying days of venerable Rank Film Studios, made up of: The Human Factor (1979), The Riddle of the Sands (1979), and The Lady Vanishes (1979), and like its brethren it was a disappointment at the box-office, effectively ending Powell's leading man status in British Cinema. If the film is remembered at all today, it is for one of Sharp's hall of fame action set pieces, a white-knuckle climax that has Hannay dangling from the clock face of Big Ben in order to prevent a bomb from destroying the Palace of Westminster. Sadly, when it is said that they don't make feature films like this anymore, they are regrettably correct and we are all the poorer for it. DVD REGION 2

AUSTRALIAN ACTION MAN Part One

CALLAN (1974: Dir. Don Sharp)

After Errol Flynn, filmmaker Don Sharp is the second most famous person to be born in Hobart, Tasmania, and like his swashbuckling countryman, Sharp was also identified with flamboyant action and stunts, albeit from behind the camera. Beginning his career in Britain as a director of B-movie programmers and early episodic television, Sharp was eventually hired by Hammer Films to oversee a trilogy of quality genre films: Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964), and Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966). At the same time maverick producer Harry Alan Towers chose Sharp to direct the first two films of his Fu Manchu series starring Christopher Lee. All of these projects demonstrated Sharp's strong eye for visual composition and pace, whisking the audience along despite plot absurdities and limited production resources. Working in these rip-roaring genres, Sharp rapidly built a reputation as an action specialist, particularly in his role of second unit director on two logistically complicated features, directing both the vehicular mayhem in Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines (1965), and the comedy spy antics in Bang, Bang, You're Dead (1966), as well as the heart-stopping Amsterdam boat chase in the narcotics crime thriller Puppet On A Chain (1971). Assignments like these made him a natural to bring scale and excitement to the cinematic incarnation of creator James Mitchells' popular TV spy series Callan (1967-1972). Starring a magnetically intense Edward Woodward, David Callan is a street smart agent/assassin whose disdain for authority coupled with his sang froid and skill with small arms always draws the most unsavory jobs from his British Intelligence superior, code-named Hunter. The original series although highly acclaimed was hampered by its cost-cutting videotaped mise-en-scene, mostly taking place in cramped, seedy offices or dull flats. Adapted from the original pilot episode, the movie version of Callan re-introduces the character, this time in a more expansive though no less gritty, big-screen format. In an effort to compete with the new realism coming from Hollywood in the early Seventies, Sharp uses atmospheric locations in and around London, where he efficiently stages nerve jangling car chases, forceful fisticuffs, and non-gratuitous gun-play. Essential to the mythos of the series, are the characters of  Lonely (Russell Hunter), "a smelly little man" who is Callan's cringing criminal contact, and fellow agent Toby Meres (Peter Egan), Callan's younger jealous associate, always ready to stick the knife in to get ahead. Both actors are superb in their roles, particularly the utterly believable Hunter, although one pines for actor Anthony Valentine, TV's original oily Meres, more of a coiled cobra than Egan's impetuous toffee-nosed school prefect. Being the off-shoot of the most compelling espionage series ever made for television, director Sharp had much expectation to contend with, but with his steady hand at the wheel, audiences were assured of a smoothly entertaining ride, with all of the suspense and drama of what was, and is Callan. DVD REGION 2