Movie Review: The Man With The Golden Arm (1955)

Genre: Addiction Drama

Director: Otto Preminger

Starring: Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak

Running Time: 119 minutes

Synopsis: Frankie Machine (Frank Sinatra) returns to his old neighbourhood after a six month addiction treatment stint. An ace card dealer for back-alley poker games, he now wants to stay clean and become a jazz drummer. His bitter and clingy wife Sophia (Eleanor Parker) is confined to a wheelchair and hiding a secret, but Frankie has a warmer relationship with his downstairs neighbour Molly (Kim Novak). Frankie finds it difficult to resist bad influences and is soon pressured back into old habits.

What Works Well: Screenwriter Walter Newman and director Otto Preminger create a hypnotic down-and-out litter-strewn neighbourhood corner dominated by the local bar and neon signs for gaudy nightclubs. This is not an environment for kicking an addiction habit, and unsurprisingly Frankie's good intentions are threatened by well-entrenched sleazoids, from his wife to the local drug peddler (Darren McGavin) and the poker game organizer (Robert Strauss). Frank Sinatra finds a career peak, throwing himself into an addition ordeal with admirable zest. Elmer Bernstein's music and Saul Bass' opening credit sequence are both iconic.

What Does Not Work As Well: The outdoor set is clearly studio-bound on the RKO lot, and Frankie's up-and-down cycles are a bit repetitive.

Conclusion: A gritty and compelling humanization of addiction's stranglehold.



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Movie Review: How To Steal The World (1968)

A low-budget spy adventure, How To Steal The World is devoid of wit but stocked full of bad special effects and disinterested acting.

Near Macau, UNCLE agents Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) and Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) fail to capture THRUSH leader Mr. Webb (Peter Mark Richman), who escapes with the help of Margitta Kingsley (Eleanor Parker). She is the wife of UNCLE agent Robert Kingsley (Barry Sullivan), who soon disappears. Solo and Kuryakin are dispatched to investigate.

From his headquarters in the Himalayas, Robert has hatched a well-intentioned plan to eliminate world violence by releasing a docile gas. He assembles seven renowned scientists to help perfect the formula, and hires General Harmon (Leslie Nielsen) to provide base security. Unbeknownst to Robert, Mr. Webb and Margitta are monitoring his every move on behalf of THRUSH, waiting to pounce and usurp his world domination plans.

The eighth and final feature film cobbled together from television episodes of The Man From UNCLE, How To Steal The World is a tired affair, operating well past the series' best-by date. The hallmark joie de vivre is gone, replaced by a sense of fatigue. Vaughn and McCallum go through the motions with robotic indifference, Solo and Kuryakin rarely actually doing anything other than offering themselves as targets. The clever banter and winks of humour are replaced by long stretches of silence, the Norman Hudis script apparently not even trying. 

The rest of the cast members operate in bland or over-animated modes, while Eleanor Parker manages both, lounging on her back when she's not vamping for the camera. Leslie Nielsen as the general eager to create peace through violence is too far removed from reality to classify as either intentionally funny or unintentionally awful.

The story is an over-complicated and still nonsensical control-the-world plot cluttered by too many scientists donning monk robes (?), while THRUSH adds a muddled conspiracy on top of a conspiracy. Worse of all are the truly atrocious visual effects, director Sutton Roley frequently inserting stock footage whenever a shot is too expensive for the television-level budget. The discontinuous, jarring, and cheesy results start to carry dangerous echoes of none other than Plan 9 From Outer Space. 

Lacking even Jerry Goldsmith's music, How To Steal The World is a lesson in incompetent opportunism.



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Movie Review: The Naked Jungle (1954)

A romantic drama and disaster thriller, The Naked Jungle juxtaposes a unique marital conflict with an impressive nature-induced catastrophe.

It's the early 1900s and mail-order bride Joanna (Eleanor Parker) completes a long journey from New Orleans to the South American jungle to meet her new husband Christopher Leiningen (Charlton Heston). He is a proud self-made man who left home 15 years prior at age 19 and carved a vast cacao plantation out of previously flooded land with the help of local tribe members.

Christopher has no experience with women and is shocked to find Joanna not only stunningly beautiful but confidently standing up to him and speaking her mind. They clash repeatedly, and once he learns she is a widow he rejects her, unable to deal with his wife not being a virgin.

But after he makes plans for her to return to New Orleans the plantation comes under an existential threat from the all-consuming ant army known as the marabunta. Joanna will have to decide if her relationship with Christopher is worth fighting for as he stands to lose everything.

An innovative hybrid unafraid to chart new territory, The Naked Jungle effectively merges two disparate themes into one drama. Based on a 1937 short story by Carl Stephenson, the film is a remarkably efficient 95 minutes with director Byron Haskin wasting no time in setting the jungle context and introducing Joanna and Christopher as two compelling characters. They meet for the first time but are already husband-and-wife, and in a case of two similar personalities clashing, the tension of incompatibility jumps off the screen. Both are smart, proud, stubborn, sensual and outspoken, but he is too caught up in his own legend to accept an equal counterpart.

The first hour traces their relationship with no shortcuts and no easy resolutions. Some of the emotional notes suffer from clunky repetition as Christopher refines his (mostly) passive aggressive mistreatment. Gradually the couple at least grow more civil towards each other as he concludes that the marriage experiment was a bad idea and she has to return from whence she came. 

Then the local whispers of something strange deep in the jungle grow into more urgent drum beats about an approaching army of ants two miles wide and twenty miles deep, devouring everything in its path. True to form Christopher decides he will make a stand to try and save his life's work. He accelerates Joanna's planned departure, now more out of care than dismissiveness. 

But she has other ideas and the final 25 minutes are a breathless and genuinely exciting battle against a billion-ant beast. The special effects conceived by George Pal are stellar for the era, and Haskin is successful at finding an eloquent resolution to serve both narrative streams.  

Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker make for an appealing forced couple. Parker in particular finds joy in an early feminist role, uncomplaining but never silenced and always adhering to her principles and essence. The rather sparse supporting cast includes Abraham Sofaer as Christopher's chief aid, William Conrad as the judicious local commissioner and John Dierkes as a competing plantation owner. But with two powerful central characters and a billion ants on the march, The Naked Jungle has understandably little room or need for anyone else.

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Movie Review: The Sound Of Music (1965)

An epic musical drama and romance, The Sound Of Music is a flawlessly executed old-fashioned celebration of love and hope blossoming in the most unexpected places.

It's the 1930s and free-spirited music-loving Maria (Julie Andrews) is struggling to fit in as a nun-in-training at an abbey on the outskirts of Salzburg. The Mother Abbess (Peggy Wood) asks Maria to try life as a governess instead, helping the family of widower and distinguished navy veteran Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) and his seven children.

A staunch Austrian nationalist living in an impressively grand mansion, the Captain is a strict disciplinarian who fires governesses for fun. Maria has to work hard to introduce affection and joy through music to the lives of his children. They vary in age from 16 to five, with the eldest Liesl (Charmian Carr) starting an amorous relationship with telegram delivery boy Rolfe (Daniel Truhitte).

The Captain comes back from a trip to Vienna with his wife-to-be, the very rich Baroness Elsa von Schraeder (Eleanor Parker), as well as family friend and musical talent spotter Max Detweiler (Richard Haydn). Despite frequent verbal sparring the Captain and Maria start to fall in love, much to the consternation of the Baroness. But then the dark shadow of Nazi Germany, as represented by local collaborator Herr Zeller (Ben Wright), starts to descend on Austria, threatening the family's new-found happiness.

An adaptation of the 1959 Broadway show with music by Richard Rogers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, the film is directed by Robert Wise with an eye to perfect framing and glossy postcard-style visuals. The story is loosely based on the adventures of the real-life von Trapp family as recounted in a book written by one of the daughters, and carries enough stranger-than-fiction drama to propel the film's 174 minutes. Despite musical repetition creeping into the last hour, The Sound Of Music never drags and effortlessly breezes by.

With a voice carrying immense range and crystalline beauty, Julie Andrews unleashes inexhaustible energy as Maria. Her wide-eyed, pragmatic and stand-your-ground portrayal of a young woman venturing into a new world of marble columns and grand estate rooms is a large part of the film's appeal. Maria cannot help but speak her mind, a trait she is keenly aware of, and as it turns out her outspokenness is exactly what is needed to puncture Captain von Trapp's aloofness. Christopher Plummer has a lot less to do as the Captain, but creates the cold canvass on which Andrews pours her warmth.

Despite the story, the acting, the sweet children and the menacing Nazis, The Sound Of Music is first and foremost all about the music, and the soundtrack is one of the all-time classics in the history of cinema. Yes, the tunes and lyrics are simplistic, cutesy, hummable and laser-targeted at parents and their younger children. But songs like Do-Re-Me, Sixteen Going On Seventeen and My Favorite Things are undeniably catchy and adorable, and immediately evoke Wise's lush visuals of the breathtaking Austrian countryside and Salzberg's idyllic appeal. And Wise does find some exquisite emotional highlights through the music. The Captain's rendition of Edelweiss to his family is an affecting moment, while the Something Good duet is a pure expression of mutual love.

The Sound Of Music casts a family-friendly magic spell, and the film's sense of pure enchantment is easy to love.

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