Movie Review: The Salamander (1981)

Genre: Political Thriller  
Director: Peter Zinner  
Starring: Franco Nero, Anthony Quinn, Martin Balsam, Eli Wallach, Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning, Claudia Cardinale  
Running Time: 96 minutes  

Synopsis: In Italy, a military general is murdered, triggering concerns about a potential Fascist takeover plot. Colonel Dante Matucci (Franco Nero) of the internal security services investigates with the help of his mentor Captain Steffanelli (Martin Balsam). The murdered general's mistress Lili Anders (Sybil Danning) is revealed to be a spy for leftist sympathizers, and Dante's further sleuthing leads him to industrialist Bruno Manzini (Anthony Quinn), the scheming General Leporello (Eli Wallach), Director of Counterintelligence Prince Baldasar (Christopher Lee), and a torture specialist known as The Surgeon. Eventually, Dante's life is threatened as he gets close to uncovering a dangerous conspiracy. 

What Works Well: This Lew Grade production adapts the Morris West book with no shortage of ambition and an admirable deep dive into political machinations, Italian style. The entirely-on-location cinematography captures sun-drenched landmarks and lavish interiors without succumbing to travelogue stereotypes. Jerry Goldsmith's music score adds further gloss, but the main attraction is a dream international cast, none of them stretching but all of them competent. 

What Does Not Work As Well: Despite the efficient running time, the pace is plodding, most scenes consisting of stiff individual interactions between Matucci and a lineup of shady suspects. A few bursts of action attempt to punctuate proceedings, but these are more clumsy than effective. Few of the plot details make any sense, with the antagonists suspiciously passive as the investigation unfolds. In a world populated by the villains on display here, Captain Matucci would have disappeared in short order.

Key Quote:

Matucci: Do something Italian, Lili. Change sides.

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Movie Review: Beyond Mombasa (1956)

Genre: Adventure  

Director: George Marshall  

Starring: Cornel Wilde, Donna Reed, Christopher Lee  

Running Time: 90 minutes  

Synopsis: Matt Campbell (Cornel Wilde) arrives in Kenya at the invitation of his brother George, only to learn from missionary Hoyt (Leo Genn) that George has just been murdered by tribals known as Leopard Men. Matt becomes romantically interested in Hoyt's niece Ann Wilson (Donna Reed), and meets George's business associates Rossi (Christopher Lee) and Hastings (Ron Randell). They travel into the dangerous jungle to search for a mine that George had uncovered, and Matt starts to suspect that his brother was betrayed in a business dispute.

What Works Well: The first 30 minutes of this B-movie provide a decent sweaty foundation for an adventure mystery drama. Director George Marshall leverages the on-location scenery to efficiently introduce the characters involved in murder and intrigue, with Donna Reed stylishly overdressed for every occasion but game for a spiky romance with Cornel Wilde.

What Does Not Work As Well: Once the adventure moves into the jungle it degenerates into a repetitive trudge, with stock safari footage (a Noah's arc procession of elephants, crocodiles, giraffes, and rhinoceroses) badly spliced into the action. The flimsy content becomes more apparent with an interminable interlude of tribal dancing. The villain is easy to spot, and the climactic showdown featuring enraged locals borders on ridiculous.

Conclusion: Never mind the beasts, the real jungle hazards include simplistic plot points, macho posturing, and superficial acting.

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Movie Review: Bear Island (1979)

A basic thriller, Bear Island offers a good cast and plenty of stunts, but the rather senseless plot is beyond salvation.

American academic Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland) joins a group of international scientists researching climate change on the remote and icy Bear Island, located between Norway and the Arctic Circle in the Barents Sea. The expedition leader is German Otto Geran (Richard Widmark), and the other scientists include Norway's Heddi Lindquist (Vanessa Redgrave), Poland's Lechinski (Christopher Lee), American Smithy (Lloyd Bridges) and Canada's Judith Rubin (Barbara Parkins).

Bear Island was a Nazi naval base bombed heavily towards the end of the World War Two, and Lansing reveals he is the son of a German U-Boat commander. Geran designates parts of the island off-limits to the other scientists. Suspicious mishaps including avalanches and explosions start to beset the expedition and it becomes quickly apparent that an evil plot is unfolding and the scientists are in grave danger.

A Canadian production directed by Don Sharp, Bear Island is a perfunctory adaptation of the Alistair MacLean's novel. The cast is talented, the stunt performers do their job well and Sharp effectively conveys the unforgiving environment of ice, snow, wind and bitter cold. But the sloppy and barely defined treasure hunt story is straight from the bottom drawer of adventure ideas and unlikely to resonate with anyone past the age of ten.

Bear Island jettisons all its intriguing climate change research subplot within the first 15 minutes. After brief introductions the scientists are reduced to unwilling participants in a frozen version of And Then There Were None, one scientist killed or seriously hurt every ten minutes or so. Once revealed, the villains are a disappointing clutch of featureless characters, while the assorted red herrings are just as bland.

The action scenes are plentiful and feature a killer avalanche, a mammoth explosion, a completely unnecessary dunk in icy waters and a high speed chase across snowy terrain using innovative motorized vehicles. Due to the lack of engaging content elsewhere, Sharp prolongs these scenes well past what is necessary, and as a result the stunt performers appear to get more screen time than the cast members.

Bear Island is cluttered with hidden history and secret agendas, all of them best kept frozen.

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Movie Review: The Passage (1979)

A World War Two escape thriller, The Passage features a stellar but poorly utilized cast struggling against a feeble script and the stench of a low budget production.

With France under Nazi occupation, hardy Basque sheep farmer (Anthony Quinn) is reluctantly recruited by the French resistance for a dangerous mission to smuggle American scientist Professor Bergson (James Mason) across the Pyrenees and into Spain.

Bergston is hiding in Toulouse, and the Basque is shocked to learn that the frail Mrs. Bergson (Patricia Neal) and the couple's two grown children (Kay Lenz and Paul Clemens) are accompanying their father. Meanwhile, sadistic SS Captain Von Berkow (Malcolm McDowell) is intent on hunting down the Professor. After receiving help from a gypsy leader (Christopher Lee), the escape party start their perilous journey across the snow-covered mountains, with Von Berkow in hot pursuit.

A British production directed by veteran J. Lee Thompson, The Passage collects an impressive cast and aims for an old-fashioned but smaller-scaled World War Two adventure in the vein of Thompson's The Guns Of Navarone from 1961. With a decent premise and impressive mountainous scenery supplementing the stars, the raw ingredients are promising.

But The Passage suffers from production values that appear cheap and hurried, and the script (by Bruce Nicolayson, adapting his own book) ignores everything related to backstories and personal dynamics. Most of the characters are hardly afforded a name, let alone rounded into individuals, with James Mason's Professor Bergson the primary victim. All of the dialogue is of the plastic variety, while Thompson's directing is muddled, his handling of the action scenes bordering on inept.

The void of quality is filled with shock value, and The Passage is notorious for all the wrong reasons. The main eye-popping excuse to watch the film is a misplaced Malcolm McDowell performance. His full-on British accent unexplained and unconstrained, McDowell mushes Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange with Caligula and enters World War Two with ridiculous madness. His Captain Von Berkow is an all-time over-the-top experience, a star running amok with no guidance from his director.

And Von Berkow steers The Passage to a second claim to infamy as an exercise in excess violence and gore. The SS Captain perpetuates on-screen rape, torture, immolation and mass murder, and on a couple of occasions punctuates his atrocities with pantomime-level outfits. His articulated chef chop-chop scene is admittedly compelling as an indecorous horror-comedy routine.

The Passage is thankfully a mostly forgotten curiosity, a lost opportunity buried in the jagged mountains.

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Movie Review: Night Train To Lisbon (2013)

A morose political drama and romance, Night Train To Lisbon packs in plenty of plot but remains more ponderous than provocative.

In Berne, grey professor Raimund (Jeremy Irons) rescues a woman before she can jump off a bridge. She promptly flees, and in her coat pocket Raimund finds a book and a train ticket to Lisbon. Impulsively he hops onto the train, and en route reads the book, which turns out to be a memoir by Amadeu (Jack Huston), a young aristocratic Portuguese doctor. Raimund is deeply affected by the lyrical prose, and in Lisbon goes looking for the author. He visits Amadeu's sister Adriana (Charlotte Rampling), and learns that the doctor died in 1974.

Through a fortuitous accident Raimund meets optometrist Mariana (Martina Gedeck), whose uncle João (Tom Courtenay) knew Amadeu. Raimund also talks to Amadeu's teacher, the priest Father Bartolomeu (Christophe Lee). Slowly Raimund pieces together the history of a group of idealistic college graduates involved in the underground resistance against the Salazar dictatorship in the early 1970s. The group consisted of Amadeu, his best friend Jorge (August Diehl), João and the beautiful Estefânia (Mélanie Laurent). As Raimund learns about the struggles and loves of the young activists, he questions his own restrained life.

An adaptation of the Pascal Mercier novel directed Bille August, Night Train To Lisbon has ambitions to be an intellectual and literary mystery. While the tone is earnest, the pacing thoughtful, and the content rich, the film also leans towards excessive self-absorption. August succumbs early and often to narration consisting of excerpts from Amadeu's book that may or may not be profound, but are certainly out of place. And Raimund's entire search-for-identity quest is off target, his suddenly instinctive and persistent actions inconsistent with the character.

The girl-on-the-bridge opening is a beguiling mystery, but the film takes far too long to circle back to the incident, and overall no one in Lisbon appears to hesitate before revealing long held personal secrets to the inquisitive stranger from Berne. And far too much time is spent with Raimund going back and forth between Adriana and Jorge, the plotline revealed through intentionally interrupted drips that may work on the written page but not in a 110 minute screen treatment.

The flashback scenes, where the film spends a good half of its running time, come with their own problems. The acting talent is generally about two levels down from the likes of Jeremy Irons, Charlotte Rampling and Christopher Lee, and the young activists appear to exist out of context. August spends next to no time establishing the framework of the Salazar regime, and tries to fit a full plot about young anti-government agitators, complete with a love triangle, into half of a movie's length. Not unexpectedly it all comes across as half-baked and borderline amateurish.

Night Train To Lisbon has good intentions to recount a worthwhile story, but is thwarted by clumsy execution.

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Movie Review: Airport '77 (1977)

A disaster movie with a galaxy of stars trapped on a submerged airliner, Airport '77 is as corny as can be expected but also surprisingly well produced.

Aging tycoon Philip Stevens (James Stewart) invites high profile guests to travel on his lavishly outfitted private Boeing 747 en route to the grand opening of his home-based museum. Captain Don Gallagher (Jack Lemmon) is in command of the flight, while Eve Clayton (Brenda Vaccaro) is Don's long-time lover and in charge of passenger comfort. The guests include Nicholas St. Downs III (Joseph Cotten) and Emily Livingston (Olivia de Havilland), who first met in the 1930s and are reunited on the flight. Businessman Martin Wallace (Christopher Lee) and his neglected and perpetually drunk wife Karen (Lee Grant) are also on the flight, as are Stevens' daughter Lisa (Pamela Bellwood) and her young son.

In the cargo hold is a large collection of expensive art, and this attracts a band of thieves under the leadership of co-pilot Chambers (Robert Foxworth). Over the Bermuda Triangle the criminals release a sleeping gas to knock out Gallagher and all the passengers, and Chambers changes course, flying below the radar towards an uninhabited island. But in dense fog the 747 clips an off-shore oil rig, the plane crashes into the sea and sinks to the sea bed, intact but leaking. Gallagher has to keep the passengers calm and find a way to notify rescuers of the plane's location while the Navy and Coast Guard mount a search operation.

Directed by Jerry Jameson, Airport '77 arrived relatively late in the cycle of 1970s disaster films. By now the formula is overly familiar: collect a bunch of mostly elderly Hollywood stars, place them in peril, and play a parlour game of who lives and who dies before the credits roll. While everything about the film is conventional, the production values are well above average, yielding a mixed experience where the content is tired but the packaging is slick.

Disaster movies tend to work better in confined spaces, and the coffin-under-the-sea premise is appropriately claustrophobic and generates a real sense of danger, with water slowly seeping into the plane, and the passengers threatened with both drowning and asphyxiation.

The film's ambitions are reflected in a superior cast deep in veteran talent. Lemmon and Cotten are most prominent and get to run around the bowels of the cavernous plane and play the role of heroes. The likes of Stewart, de Havilland, Grant and Lee ensure that as irritating as the passengers are, they are good at being irritating. George Kennedy makes his obligatory disaster movie appearance, but this time is limited to a more minor role as a rescue coordinator. The special effects are decent for the era and have survived the test of time.

The final act transforms into a propaganda piece for the rescue capabilities of the Navy and Coast Guard, and although again the cheese factor is odorous, the execution is polished. Jameson keeps the pacing tight, delivering the drama in under two hours, and the final acts of tactical implementation, heroism, and late-in-the-day death are completed with requisite precision.

Airport '77 is definitely all wet, but enjoys its time in the cinematic tub.

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The Movies Of Christopher Lee

All movies starring Christopher Lee and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Beyond Mombasa (1956)

Hannie Caulder (1971)

The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

Airport '77 (1977)

Bear Island (1979)

The Passage (1979)

1941 (1979)

The Salamander (1981)

Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones (2002)

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)

Hugo (2011)

Night Train To Lisbon (2013)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Hannie Caulder (1971)

A British-made revenge Western with a mashing of Spaghetti sub-genre elements, Hannie Caulder attempts to capitalize on Raquel Welch's comely assets but is betrayed by an uneven tone and underdeveloped ideas.

Frontier woman Hannie Caulder (Welch) is violently raped and her husband is killed by the Clemens gang of three brothers (Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin). Hannie vows revenge, and teams up with bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp). Together they travel to Mexico and visit legendary gun-maker Bailey (Christopher Lee), who forges a gun for Hannie. Price then teaches her the finer points of killing men in a shootout. Hannie and Price catch up with the Clemens brothers in a nearby town, but Hannie will find killing her tormentors more difficult than she imagined.

The project was conceived as a star vehicle for Ms. Welch, and co-funded by her Curtwel production company. Directed by Western veteran Burt Kennedy and filmed in Spain, Hannie Caulder boasts a decent cast and a traditional if tired premise. But the film collapses from neglect, due mainly to what appears to be a hurriedly written script by Kennedy under the pseudonym Z.X. Jones.

The tone is fundamentally unbalanced, leaving the film spinning between coarse humour, grim revenge, and attempts at gory violence. The Clemens gang resemble the Three Stooges on a bad day, the ruffians trading insults that are meant to be funny. The bad humour sits uneasily next to the rape and murder that they nonchalantly dole out, and the large gobs of bright red blood that sprays out of every victim of a gun shot.

Even worse, some key events and characters drift in and out of the film with no explanation. A small army of Mexican bandits attacks Bailey's beachfront house, triggering a mass shootout with dozens of casualties. Who these bandits are and what they wanted is never even tangentially explained. And there is a dark, mysterious gunman who makes a couple of critical interventions during Hannie's journey, including the small matter of saving her life. His identity and motivation are left up to the imagination.

Welch does as best as can be expected. Her extremely limited range is kept under the wraps of a character who does not need to say much. Towards the end of the film she starts trading snappy one-liners, and does so with a dull trace of conviction. Meanwhile, her figure is coyly hinted at through some clever fashion choices, including a poncho with not much underneath for much of the film.

The surprisingly strong supporting cast rides along for the pay cheque. Borgnine, Elam and Martin are noisy, dirty, and annoying. Lee is unsure what he is doing in the film; Hannie Caulder must be the only Western movie where characters cross borders and wait for weeks to obtain a pistol. Only Robert Culp as bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price is able to add any weight to the proceedings. On the plus side, the cinematography is decent.

Hannie Caulder is a third-rate Western for what was then a third-rate actress with first-rate looks.

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Movie Review: The Man With The Golden Gun (1974)

The James Bond series hits an almost fatal low-point. The Man With The Golden Gun is a witless adventure for Agent 007, the movie hampered by a limp plot and littered with low-grade and sometimes dumbfounding attempts at humour.

Bond (Roger Moore) receives a death threat in the form of a golden bullet etched with "007". International gun-for-hire Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) is known to use golden bullets, and after Bond is relieved of an assignment to investigate a solar energy industrialist, he tracks down Scaramanga through a belly dancer in Beirut and a specialty weapons manufacturer in Macau. The trail leads to Scaramanga's mistress Andrea Anders (Maud Adams) in Hong Kong, promptly seduced by Bond much to the disappointment of local agent Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland), a witless dumb blond.

Bond uncovers a link between Scaramanga and Hai Fat, a Thai master criminal seeking control of a "solex agitator", a device that regulates solar power production. Hai Fat captures Bond, but he makes his escape with the help of local contact Lieutenant Hip (Soon-Tek Oh), despite the noisy reappearance of Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James). Scaramanga and his dwarf assistant Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) turn the tables on all their enemies and make an escape to a secluded small island base off the coast of China, where Scaramanga is converting solar power into marketable energy as well as ray gun weaponry. Bond has to infiltrate the island and thwart the plans of the master assassin.

Almost everything in The Man With The Golden Gun misses the target. The plot is a messy byproduct of mashing the energy crisis of the early 1970s with the martial arts movie craze brought about by the Bruce Lee-inspired era. The grand evil plan is so unconvincing that the main villain himself has no interest in understanding it, the big reveal consisting of Bond rattling on about solar technology while Scaramanga dismissively admits that he cares for none of it.

And the missteps continue. Britt Ekland ensures that Mary Goodnight looks great in a bikini, but Goodnight is the dumbest woman ever labelled as an agent in any movie, Bond or otherwise. Two giggly teenaged girls help Bond to escape from Hai Fat by defeating dozens of male student at a martial arts school. The title song by Lulu is easily among the worst in the series. And someone actually thought that bringing Sheriff J.W. Pepper back for another round of redneck humour after Live And Let Die was a good idea.

And the one great moment in the film, an incredible flying car stunt featuring full rotation along the longitudinal axis, is incomprehensibly ruined. Director Guy Hamilton, mercifully helming his final Bond adventure, conspires with composer John Barry and producer Albert Broccoli to insert a comic slide whistle sound to accompany the stunt, degrading a dramatic technical achievement to the level of a cheap vaudevillian joke.

The few good elements revolve around the character of Scaramanga, Christopher Lee bringing to life a world-weary killer who believes that there is little difference between his career and that of Bond. There are flickers of a better movie in the brief encounters between the two men, but these are trounced by the shoe-horned solar energy nonsense and a tired funhouse final confrontation.

The poor commercial performance of The Man With The Golden Gun marked the end of the era of relatively cheap Bond adventures designed to cash in on the name with minimal effort. The trio of Diamonds Are Forever, Live And Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun represent a creative trough that could have meant the end of 007. Fortunately Moore and Broccoli would persevere and regroup, steering the series towards a big-budget comeback three years later.

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Movie Review: Star Wars Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)

George Lucas is well known for his vision in creating the Star Wars saga, and his willingness to push the boundaries of cinematic special effects.

His skills in portraying human emotions are a lot less developed.

The middle part of any trilogy is always the trickiest, needing to bridge the introduction with the climax. To further complicate matters for Lucas, Attack of the Clones is very much an emotional bridge: the maturing of Anakin Skywalker and his training as a Jedi coincide with the battle for his soul between good and evil. His inability to control anger, and his willingness to fall in love in violation of the Jedi code, are key triggers to his downfall.

It's all heady human development stuff that would be a challenge to writers and directors who are experienced in story-telling at the human scale. In the hands of Lucas the writer and director, most of the emotional drama falls flat.

The scenes of the developing romantic relationship between Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Padme (Natalie Portman) are by far the most painful to endure in the entire six-part series. The dialogue is hollow and laughable, the performances stiff, the chemistry toxic. The romantic scenes that Lucas conjures up reek with cliches (they actually roll on top of each other in a green field at one stage) and betray an utter lack of imagination, which is a dismal failure for Lucas.

He is not helped by Christensen, as the teenaged Anakin, delivering what must be one of the worst acting performances of the decade. He appears to be reading his lines in a boring monotone off the nearest wall, and is unable to project any genuine emotion or internal conflict.

The plot revolves around the rapidly deteriorating security situation in the Republic, as Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who is actually the evil Darth Sidious, continues to secretly fan the flames of war to justify the suspension of democracy. Helping him is Count Dooku (Christopher Lee, delivering a suitably understated and elegant performance), a former Jedi, who has aligned with the Trade Federation and is leading a separatist movement against the Republic.

An assassination attempt against Senator Padme Amidala of Naboo (Portman) results in Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi (a much improved Ewan McGregor) and his apprentice Anakin (Christensen) splitting up: Obi-Wan pursues Padme's attacker and uncovers a massive army of clones being readied for a massive escalation of the war.

Anakin is tasked with protecting Padme, but they instead fall in love and take a side trip to Tatooine, where Anakin must confront the destiny of his mother and face the ultimate anger management test -- which he fails miserably.

The action reaches a crescendo with Obi-Wan, Anakin, Padme, and a number of Jedi including Mace Windu and Yoda confronting Count Dooku and the large separatist army on the planet Geonosis. The Jedi are in trouble until the massive Clone army, now commanded by the Chancellor, intervenes and turns the tide of the battle in favour of the Republic, but Dooku survives to fight another day. Anakin and Padme decide to carry on with their illicit relationship, and Anakin begins to realize that he certainly does have a dark side.

The climactic battle on Geonosis is one of the highlights of the Star Wars opera. It is an all-out epic war sequence, and combines massed troops with impressive light sabre duels. Yoda's confrontation with Dooku is also well done. In all, the final third of the film goes some way towards making up for the clumsy middle.

Other than Christensen's hopeless performance, the cast are actually quite good. McGregor is much more confident as Obi-Wan, and Portman shines as the blossoming, athletic and resourceful Padme. Attack of the Clones is Portman's best moment in the Star Wars trilogy, slotting in between her child Queen role in Episode I and her pregnant-wife-in-panic mode of Episode III. Jackson and Lee add a good dose of gravitas to the proceedings.

A more adult-oriented, darker and more serious film compared to The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones did not mark a return to the greatness of hyperspace, but did place the series back on the right spaceship.

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