THE 300 SPARTANS (1962)

A glance at the date and style of advertising for this telling of the oft-told Battle of Thermopylae (the legendary Fifth Century B.C. holding action by vastly outnumbered Spartans against Xerxes’ Persian hordes) suggests one of those Sword & Sandals epics-on-the-cheap flooding the market in the wake of the huge commercial success of HERCULES UNCHAINED/’59.  Not so.  This was meant as a quality release, boasting a decent mid-level cast of Hollywood leads; top-drawer Brits in support (Ralph Richardson, David Farrar); two great cinematographers (Rudolph Maté, directing since 1947, and the great Geoffrey Unsworth lensing); generous seaside location work; and a few thousand marching soldiers scenically hugging the shoreline for spectacle.  The problem is that we only get so far in the quality department while missing the chance for campy fun without vocally dubbed over-muscled beefcake taking the leading roles.  It’s a little dull and a lot dutiful.  Still, not bad at telling the tale, a true legend we stick to with reasonable fidelity; only losing our way in some added-on straight romance for a disgraced Spartan whose eventual sacrifice can’t come soon enough to spare us from his emoting.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The film probably best watched before something like the artsy, eye-popping, but narrative-challenged 300/’06, Zach Synder’s OTT vision of the even better graphic novel by Frank Miller & Lynn Varley.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/07/300-2006.html

DEEP COVER (1992)

As so often the case, unsung director Bill Duke can't put a foot wrong in this undercover cop story.  Laurence Fishburne is the regular beat cop recruited by Charles Martin Smith’s Fed NARCO to plant in the West Coast drug trade, embedded deep in the organization so he can rise to expose the top California supplier.  Two problems: ONE: to get there, he’ll have to play the game for real as an insider; TWO: by the time he gets to the guy, he’ll be no different than the men he’s been stealth hunting.  Nothing original there, but Duke makes it feel fresh and suspenseful with cross-play between the corrupt and the corruptible.  A distinction that certainly includes Washington, D.C., apt to change who they want to take down depending on changes in Central American governments.  Scripter Michael Tolkin (just off THE PLAYER/’92) fills in Fishburne’s character with a father’s death, a surrogate son, a romance with a beautiful art gallery manager/money launderer, but mostly with a bromance with partner in crime Jeff Goldblum, reminding you he can do a lot more than recycle Jeff Goldblum tics.*  These two a fascinating double act; straight, but with sexual voltage steaming out of their ears.  It leads to a veritable liebestod of a finale with Fishburne confessing he’s working for the Feds and Goldblum confessing how it needn’t change the relationship.  They might be Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown at the end of SOME LIKE IT HOT/’59, when Lemmon pulls off the wig and says ‘Because I’m a guy,’ and a still smitten Joe E. Brown replies, ’ Well, nobody’s perfect.’  Except this is no comedy.  Technical chops, brilliant stylized use of color, relentless pacing, no dull content, standout perfs, how does Duke pull these things off so consistently?

DOUBLE-BILL:   Now in his 80s, Duke remains active as actor & director.  Best known for Urban Crime pics and ‘quality’ series tv, his first feature-length work, THE KILLING ROOM/’83 already a near classic.  It can be tricky to find since it was made for PBS American Playhouse, and is often listed under the series’ title.  Complex and sophisticated filmmaking on the beginnings of the Chicago Meat Workers Union, and how racial issues affected work relations before and after WWI.  Why Duke never gets mentioned as a pioneering Black filmmaker is beyond me.  Maybe he was just too good to need that sort of special pleading.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:   *Goldblum quite the clotheshorse in this film.  But then, he probably wears them as well as any male star since Rex Harrison in UNFAITHFULLY YOURS back in 1948.

SOUTHERN COMFORT (1981)

LORD OF THE FLIES meets DELIVERANCE in Walter Hill’s chilling survivor tale about a small platoon of National Guardsman on a training exercise that goes haywire in the swamp-lands of Louisiana Cajun country.  An easy allegory to American interventionist policies, here weekend warriors fire blanks, justify action with patriotic patronizing & arrogance, or cite first-world entitlement with empty phrases of pigheaded stubbornness and feverish religion.  Hill smartly lets parallels to recent foreign entanglements speak for themselves to concentrate on how the men got into deep shit with unseen/unfriendly natives.  (You can’t call Cajuns indigenous people, but that’s the idea.)  No surprise then that the lost men's desperate situation is entirely brought on by the Guards' own actions and willful ignorance; the squad misreading themselves and their attackers.  Peter Coyote and Fred Ward are part of this Ugly American team, but the film belongs to new Texas import Powers Boothe (able to see things plain), and local reservist Keith Carradine, a good ol’ boy of character; no redneck he.  Carradine never did anything finer.  Filmed in hellish swamp locations, Hill is phenomenal with his cast, and with the settings.*   While staging the action, especially a last attack in the middle of a small town food festival, in terrific fashion.  What action chops!  Clear logistics and believable consequences.  Hurrah!  (It really shouldn’t be so rare.)

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/SPOILER:  *Hill's sole unforced error a major one, yet another example, typical of the time, in tagging the one meaningful Black player with the most gruesome death.

THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1998)

Leonardo DiCaprio was still in his ‘Tadzio’ period when he followed TITANIC/’97 with yet another version of this Alexandre Dumas perennial, it’s the one where the aging Three Musketeers plot to replace bad-boy King Louis XIV with his secretly imprisoned identical twin.  Grand entertainment from Dumas, here over-elaborated by BRAVEHEART/’95 scripter Randall Wallace making a queasy directing debut.  Wallace showing a positive knack for placing the camera too close or too far from the action.*  But about halfway in, Dumas’s narrative irony and sheer gusto, along with good teamwork by the male leads (Jeremy Irons, Gérard Depardieu, John Malkovich and Gabriel Byrne showing rare positive energy) come to rescue him.  Alas, the women less memorable.  Like the generic sets & costumes, they may be real, but look rented.  And DiCaprio?  Fine as the ‘nice’ twin (if only we had a chance to see him grow into his the Pretender King), but not so convincing as a cruel debaucher.  And what’s with composer Nick Glennie-Smith?  Usually an arranger, he uses a Pan Pipe for a wistful melody.  A Pan Pipe?  In Versailles?  (Maybe he thought the company was still making BRAVEHEART.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Not that this version is unwatchable.  But so many superior versions, some even follow the book!  Hard to beat Douglas Fairbanks’ 1929 farewell to silent cinema, THE IRON MASK.   By 1998, light, literate period adventures hopelessly out of fashion when not guyed as ‘camp.’  Yet one of the best in decades had just showed up, LE BOSSU/’97 a late effort from Philippe de Broca with Daniel Auteuil & Vincent Perez in terrific form.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/le-bossuon-guard-1997.html

SCREWT THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *You got the feeling from attempts at the genre around this time, that not only had filmmakes forgotten how these things worked, but that they were embarrassed to be trying.

TRUCK TURNER (1975)

With films that moved more freely between HIGH Art and LOW than nearly anyone else in Hollywood at the time, director Jonathan Kaplan, who died last year at 77, didn’t put up the usual neat career arc.  His epitaph might read: Memorably Malleable.  Here, he’s down for a Blaxploitation pic with Isaac Hayes as an ass-kickin’ Bounty Hunter working with partner Alan Weeks in violent pursuit of bail skippers.  Hayes in big gun/love machine mode; Weeks making like Richard Pryor as sidekick.  Both hitting the mark.  The first half holds to larky fun (sex, bloody fights, snappy comeback lines, car chases), but the second half changes gears with the belated entrance of Yaphet Kotto.  Not that it gets serious, we’re still pushing Blaxploitation tropes, but deadly consequences are suddenly in effect.  Kotto taking over a revenge mission of Hayes’ enemies, backed by Nichelle Nichols’ rich avenging Madame; Kotto a more formidable antagonist and, as actor, good as it gets in this sort of thing.  Actually, Kotto good as it gets in just about anything he turned his hand to.  (But as a Black actor at the time, he simply didn’t get the chance to show his full range often enough.)  TURNER remains good fun of its type, and very well-handled by Kaplan given the low production values you expect with American International Pictures.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Quentin Tarantino’s Blaxploitation pastiche JACKIE BROWN/’97 probably got as much from this film as it did from the Pam Grier films of the ‘70s.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/jackie-brown-1997.html

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980)

Call it THE TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD GOOD FRIDAY.  Highly-rated British mob pic, regularly short-listed for U.K. honors is something of a disappointment.  Blame journeyman director John Mackenzie, not that he does anything blatantly wrong, but he rarely rises above the adequate.  Still, a pretty good snapshot on the early Thatcher Era as seen thru the Rise & Fall of Gangster Capitalism pursued by Bob Hoskins’ Lower Class mob boss, a sort of Cockney Little Caesar.*  Over the course of one long day, he tries to close a waterfront development deal with help from American Mafia investor Eddie Constantine (excellent) while trying to figure out who’s attacking him and his organization.  Refined partner Helen Mirren tries to distract everyone from what’s going down (bombings, murder, financial melt down, Hoskins’ quick-trigger temper), but not even police quiescence and a roundup of rival gangsters can keep news from spreading.  With plenty of odd period detail to hold your attention (hideous menswear; apology-free gay players; an IRA angle), but the package feels both over and under-cooked.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Hoskins, at 5'3", even shorter than Little Caesar himself, 5'5" Edward G. Robinson.  But for a better match here, skip CAESAR for a mob pic made soon after with Eddie G. and James Cagney, SMART MONEY.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2009/04/smart-money-1931.html

NIGHT MOVES (1975)

Improbably, this private detective pic has, in the long run, proved director Arthur Penn’s best work.  Improbable when you consider how seriously he was taken, commercially & critically after THE MIRACLE WORKER (tv/stage/film), LITTLE BIG MAN/‘70 and of course BONNIE AND CLYDE/’67.  Yet NIGHT MOVES now the one Penn title whose rep has improved rather than diminished over time.  An also-ran on release, the oxygen having been sucked out of the room by Francis Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION/’74, first out with too many similarities and a seductive Euro-Art tone.  (It was also, as Coppola’s team must have known, BLOW-UP for Beginners.)  Similarities start with Gene Hackman starring in both as an investigator with a troubled private life misreading recordings (audio in CONVERSATION/16mm here) to deadly effect.  An underlying human alienation and dirge-like inevitability that seethes just below the surface.  Finally surging over its limit with a technically challenging flourish.  Writing off MOVES as just a genre vehicle for Hackman’s P.I. a mistake; and a poor excuse then & now to skip this well worked up missing person case that leads to a murdered man and half-a-million bucks in stolen art.  Plus four lying dames if you include a cheating wife and 16-yr-old Melanie Griffith's nude debut.  And Penn's got the cast to pull it off: Susan Clark’s inconstant wife; Jennifer Warren as tempting stand-in; Edward Binns as careless movie stunt arranger; James Woods as car mechanic & probable accomplice and Harris Yulin as limping lover.  A personal best from scripter Alan Sharp and boasting a grounded ‘70s Cali style look from cinematographer Bruce Surtees, elsewise shooting everything Clint Eastwood & Don Siegel were doing at the time.  Penn never tried something like this again.  Perhaps he considered it slumming.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned, THE CONVERSATION.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/conversation-1974.html

EKO / EKÕ (2025)

Indian director Dinjith Ayyathan had a local hit on this mixed genre film, shot in Malayalam, a language mostly spoken in the South which boasts some verdant mountainous terrain used here for some spectacular views & action sequences.  Spanning decades, the non-linear story construction goes back to WWII and forward to . . . when?  Now?  Just how old is that health-compromised loner supposed to be?; living with her attack dogs in a mountaintop cabin with a  hunky helper who’s not what he appears to be.  He’s surely no gentle caregiver, turning into a fighter with Martial Arts chops for an acrobatic battle with the two baddies who’ve been tracking granny.  For those pedigree dogs?  For land rights?  Hard to know under Ayyathan’s incomprehensible style of unmotivated camera movement (panning, circling, spinning in place) used for all occasions, worsened by quick, off-the-beat editing.  Scene by scene, you can tell the bad guys from the good, but even that’s subject to misreading.  (Ayyathan got his start in animation, so perhaps the technique worked better there.)  Or does Malayalam culture regularly flaunt the time/space continuum?  These eyes were lost in translation.  Literally so as the subtitles whiz by too fast to read.

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (2008)

Unnecessary corporate product, director Scott Derrickson’s wholly unmemorable remake of the beloved 1951 Sci-Fi classic misses on all fronts.  (Though it does serve to represent a lot of what we won’t miss about our current Hollywood trends.*)  While still the story of a ‘man’ from Outer Space come to warn Earthlings on the consequences of screwing up the planet (War, Pollution, Self-Destruction), it’s without wonder; philosophy; believable F/X working for rather than instead of plot; quotidian exploration of big city life by a stranger in a strange land; New-Age metal on a spaceship that has no seam (a simple, but wonderful detail in the original); nor the most thrillingly suspenseful PAUSE in film history.  (Imagine anyone quoting lines from this remake seven & a half decades later) and you sure won’t find a cast to equal the one in 1951 or match Bernard Herrmann’s groundbreaking electronically enhanced music score instantly setting scene & tone.  Keanu Reeves sounds right as Alien Cassandra, but he seems to have beamed up to play Mr. Spock.  Or is it the man who fell to Earth?  As the girl in the case (don’t be fooled by her role as expert scientist), Jennifer Connelly has zero chemistry with Reeves, though perhaps on purpose.  At least you don’t want to slap her every time she comes on screen as you do with obnoxious step-son Jaden Smith.  Yikes!  Positive notes?  Well, the film won’t wreck any feelings you hold for the original.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Naturally, the Robert Wise 1951 beauty, personal bests for Patricia Neal, Michael Rennie, Sam Jaffe and Gort.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Giving credit where credit is due.  Here that's scipter David Scarpa whose most recent are NAPOLEON/’23 and GLADIATOR II/’24, both for Ridley Scott.