Movie Review: The Competition (1980)

Genre: Romance  

Director: Joel Oliansky  

Starring: Richard Dreyfuss, Amy Irving, Lee Remick, Sam Wanamaker  

Running Time: 126 minutes  

Synopsis: Aspiring concert pianist Paul (Richard Dreyfuss) is running out of time to fulfill his potential. Still supported by his parents, he always places well but is never able to win a major competition. The prestigious Hillman competition in San Francisco may be his final opportunity. One of the other competitors is Heidi (Amy Irving), who is coached by renowned piano teacher Greta (Lee Remick). Although attracted to Heidi, Paul acts cold to avoid distractions. But when the final performances are postponed for a week, Paul and Heidi have time to fall in love.

What Works Well: The conflict between pressure-to-succeed and finding the right soulmate at the wrong time provides a spark. The classical music milieu is an elegant setting for a romance and both Richard Dreyfus and Amy Irving do well to energetically simulate playing complex piano pieces. They are surrounded by scenic San Francisco locations and a colourful cast of supporting characters. Lee Remick as Heidi's piano teacher, Sam Wanamaker as the conductor who needs to accommodate all the competitors, and the other four finalists all provide appreciable texture.

What Does Not Work As Well: Director Joel Oliansky also wrote the script, and displays an annoying tendency to run and hide from difficult conversations, finding reasons to interrupt dialogue scenes at crucial moments. While understandable that time is needed for the music performances, the length of over two hours remains bloated given the subject matter. With his erratic emotions and obnoxious behaviour, Paul is an unattractive romantic subject, while a defection-and-sickness sub-plot involving an Eastern European pianist is handled with dismissive clumsiness.

Conclusion: Mixes legato with atonal.



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Movie Review: Days Of Wine And Roses (1962)

A grim drama about the perils of alcoholism, Days Of Wine And Roses traces the agony of a middle class professional couple as they sink to the bottom of the bottle.

In San Francisco, Joe Clay (Jack Lemmon) works in public relations and easily reaches for a drink while schmoozing clients and fulfilling their unsavoury whims. He meets and quickly falls in love with Kirsten Arnesen (Lee Remick), the secretary of one of his clients. Kirsten is initially a non-drinker, but Joe introduces her to the pleasures of alcohol and soon they are both drinking heavily.

They get married and have a daughter, but his constant heavy drinking starts to take a toll on work performance. Joe is eventually re-assigned to a small account based in Houston and is forced to spend long stretches away from home, driving Kirsten to drink ever more heavily to combat loneliness. They both succumb to full-blown alcoholism and their lives enter an uncontrolled downward spiral. They reach out for help from Kirsten's father Ellis (Charles Bickford), a salt-of-the-earth landscape businessman, but any road to recovery will be treacherous.

While 1945's The Lost Weekend was about a struggling writer surrendering to his alcoholism, Days Of Wine And Roses brings the disease into mainstream living rooms. Here Joe and Kirsten are attractive, successful and respected young professionals with good careers and excellent future prospects. They have everything to lose and they test the boundaries of losing everything, their story a sobering tale of how quickly and easily the American dream can dissolve into an alcohol-saturated nightmare.

JP Miller adapted his own teleplay, while director Blake Edwards and star Jack Lemmon accepted the challenge of embracing full-on drama without a hint of the humour or even pathos that made them both famous. The result is a relentlessly bleak romance doubling down on tragedy, two lives all but destroyed as the couple enable each other's behaviour.

Whether they can recover a semblance of balance and normalcy is the subject of the film's second half, and Edwards painfully portrays the many false attempts at drying up. Each becomes ever more agonizing, the next spark of hope extinguished by succumbing to the singular first drink, months of progress dashed in an instant. Presented as one pathway out of the gutter, Alcoholics Anonymous received a real-life boost, here represented by Jack Klugman as a recovering alcoholic who reaches out to Joe at one of his low points.

Early in the film Edwards allows a few of the scenes to run longer than they need to, the initial courtship particularly laborious. And overall the script is robust but rarely finds a memorably cutting edge or poignant lyricism.

The two lead actors provide a boost whenever one is needed, as Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick embrace their roles with fearsome commitment. Both had actual struggles with alcohol, and here their performances are almost physically hard to watch. Whether rationalizing their drinking, wallowing in the happy haze of drunkenness or arguing loudly, Lemmon and Remick drive for the gritty realism of self-delusion rather than sympathy.

The film plays out to a soulful Henry Mancini soundtrack featuring judicious use of the award-winning title song, with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. Days Of Wine And Roses sounds like an idyllic romance, but as it turns out, it's either the wine, or the roses.

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Movie Review: The Medusa Touch (1978)

A supernatural psychological disaster horror film, The Medusa Touch delves into the human capacity to cause harm through the story of a brain refusing to die.

In London, author John Morlar (Richard Burton) is bludgeoned nearly to death in his apartment while watching live television coverage of a space mission to the moon going wrong. Confined to a hospital bed in a deep coma, his brain remarkably shows continued activity. With London recovering from the shock of a jumbo jet crashing into a highrise causing hundreds of casualties, French police detective Brunel (Lino Ventura), part of an exchange program, starts to investigate the assault and connects with psychologist Dr. Zonfeld (Lee Remick).

Zonfeld had been treating Morlar for years, as he believed himself responsible for multiple deaths through sheer willpower dating back to his childhood. Flashbacks reveal incidents involving his nurse, parents, and schoolmaster. As an adult Morlar practiced as a lawyer and was convinced his mental rage caused harm to a judge and a neighbour. With no shortage of potential suspects seeking revenge, Brunel realizes that as long as Morlar's brain is still active, worse is to come.

An interesting hybrid tapping into multiple 1970s film trends including The Omen-style horror and large scale disaster epics, The Medusa Touch does not quite fit into any one category but nevertheless carries its own impact. The John Briley script adapts the 1973 Peter Van Greenaway book with clarity, allowing director Jack Gold to elegantly balance events between Brunel's investigation and Morlar's troubled past, all set against the context of catastrophes still smoldering and about to occur.

Scenes of brooding, supernatural death build up to satisfying punctuation marks, and intermingle with light psychology, telekinesis and a theme of helplessness and self-doubt. And in the final act the film works its way to a larger scale altogether, the mayhem expanding from personal to brutal.

As a British / French co-production the main detective was rather clumsily changed to a Frenchman, but Lino Ventura takes the role and runs with it, bringing a welcome air of frumpled French pragmatism to the otherwise prim and proper English surroundings. Richard Burton sits in his gloomy comfort zone as John Morlar, Gold deploying plenty of extreme close-up shots of the actor's eyes but thankfully reining in his more bombastic tendencies. Lee Remick is adequate but cold, while the supporting cast includes Harry Andrews, Gordon Jackson and Alan Badel.

The film features decent special effects as detective Brunel's dogged delving into the past reveals the carnage left behind by Morlar's brain willing bad things to happen. A runaway car hurtles down a hill all on its own, a fire burns through a large school, and later on, the death and destruction expand to a larger scale, some of it difficult to watch from the more modern perspective tainted by global terrorism.

Which only serves to highlight The Medusa Touch's main theme. Morlar's remarkable story is a metaphor for the capacity to imagine and then act upon the worst possible outcomes through the red mist of rage, a fatalistic stance on humanity's ability to ever evolve past solving conflicts by violent means. One man may die, but the deep-seated readiness to cause death and destruction lives on.

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Movie Review: Experiment In Terror (1962)

A muddled crime thriller, Experiment In Terror offers dashes of style but suffers from a flabby script and an unconvincing plot.

In the Twin Peaks neighbourhood of San Francisco, bank teller Kelly Sherwood (Lee Remick) is threatened in her dark garage by an unseen intruder. He demands she steal $100,000 from the bank, otherwise he will hurt her younger sister Toby (Stefanie Powers). Despite the intruder insisting on no police involvement, Kelly connects with the FBI's John Ripley (Glenn Ford).

With few clues to go on, Ripley places Kelly under surveillance. Meanwhile, he is also contacted by Nancy Ashton (Patricia Huston), a troubled woman who may be going through a similar experience to Kelly. Ripley's investigation also leads him to Lisa Soong (Anita Loo), the mother of a sick child who may also be connected to the criminal. As the clock ticks down and the threats intensify, Kelly has to commit the theft or face the consequences.

A rare departure towards darker material for director Blake Edwards, Experiment In Terror lathers on the noir style with odd camera angles, nighttime scenes, characters hiding in shadows, plenty of fog and stark light sources. But the credible production design cannot hide a wayward plot filled with weird distractions and plenty of loose ends.

After the opening attack Kelly is unfortunately reduced to an afterthought in her own story, and the film defaults to an uninteresting police procedural. And for a seemingly well-resourced detective provided with plenty of advance notice about a crime in the making, Ripley manages to repeatedly botch the basics. Equally improbable is a convenient criminal who always does just enough to move the plot along but never enough to push through with his threats.

The problems reside in the overburdened script by the husband and wife crime writing team of Gordon and Mildred Gordon, and a saggy running time extending to over two hours. The characters of Nancy Ashton, Lisa Soong and her suffering son occupy large swaths of screen time to no great effect, their connection to the central crime barely sketched in. Meanwhile the details related to the villain's plot to steal and keep the money are all but omitted. Finally young sister Toby is placed in proper peril, but when the opportunity arises the film appears caught flat footed between seeking terror and settling for timid.

Lee Remick, Glenn Ford and a young Stefanie Powers provide plenty of star appeal, but despite the flashy execution this Experiment In Terror is flawed.

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Movie Review: A Face In The Crowd (1957)

A hard hitting drama, A Face In The Crowd examines the ruinous trend of celebrity culture propelled by television.

In a small rural Arkansas town, radio show producer Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) features hard drinking drifter Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes (Andy Griffith) on her "A Face In The Crowd" radio show. Rhodes has no talent but his rambling, honest and animated monologues capture the public's imagination. He is offered a regular radio slot, and soon attracts the attention of television producers and sponsors in Memphis. Marcia relocates with him, and teams up with acerbic writer Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) to help grow Lonesome's popularity.

Ambitious office worker Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa) recognizes Rhodes appeal, and finagles a national television deal resulting in a big contract and another relocation, this time to New York City. Now wealthy and influential beyond his dreams, Rhodes relies on Marcia to keep him somewhat grounded, but is otherwise obsessed with his celebrity status and growing influence. He starts to dabble in politics and is smitten by young cheerleader Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick).

Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, A Face In The Crowd is a prescient rags-to-riches and lust-for-power story examining the emerging influence of broadcast media. In two hours Kazan traces the trajectory of Rhodes, starting from a dank prison cell where he is passed out in the corner, all the way to a New York City penthouse with Rhodes as the nation's most prominent television personality and a political kingmaker influencing election campaigns.

A Face In The Crowd predicts the era of talentless celebrities and influencers, capable of grabbing attention and dominating the media landscape based on little more than hot air. Rhodes' only talent is to "tell it like it is", spouting home truths with apparent blue collar honesty, poking fun at corporate sponsors and speaking in language that appeals to the less educated masses huddled around their radios and televisions.

And there is plenty of money to be made on the back of an unlikely superstar, and wealth creates greedy enablers. His corporate sponsors learn to love him, and men like Joey DePalma get rich by creating business empires around him. Even Marcia, who found and unleashed the genie from the bottle, insists on getting a financial cut once she starts to doubt that Rhodes will ever be able to truly commit to her.

In his film debut, Andy Griffith is a revelation, dominating almost every scene and creating a memorable character as Rhodes rides his country boy appeal to the top, always smart enough to adapt his zeal to suit ever changing circumstances. Kazan also cajoles moments of poignancy out of Griffith, often in the company of Neal's Marcia, as it becomes apparent to Rhodes that no amount of fame can fill the void inside.

Every man has every right to pursue his dreams. A Face In The Crowd accompanies Lonesome Rhoades on his wild ride, and exposes the ease with which a nation can be entranced and manipulated by simplistic platitudes.

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Movie Review: Sanctuary (1961)

A steamy drama dealing with all manners of shocking behavior from rape and abuse to illicit love and murder, Sanctuary conjures up a thick but lumpy brew.

It's 1928 in the deep south of Mississippi, and Nancy (Odetta), a black housekeeper, is sentenced to death for murdering the infant son of her employers Temple and Gowan Stevens (Lee Remick and Bradford Dillman). Nancy seems content and accepting of her fate. On the day before the execution, Temple rushes to her father Governor Drake (Howard St. John) to appeal for a pardon. She recounts her story in flashback.

Six years prior, Temple was a young woman flirting with Gowan. He takes her out on a drunken joy ride to the backwoods, where they fall into the clutches of suave bootlegger Candy Man (Yves Montand) whose ramshackle crew includes Nancy. With Gowan passed out Temple is raped by Candy, despite Nancy's warnings. Temple anyway falls in love with her abuser and he installs her in a brothel, where she enjoys a life of blissful nihilism. Their turbulent relationship is interrupted by a fiery automobile crash, and Temple is thrown back into a life of boring domesticity with Gowan, with a lot more turmoil to come.

William Faulkner made his reputation with the book Sanctuary, published in 1931, and the sequel Requiem for a Nun followed twenty years later. Pre-Code Hollywood took a quick crack at the first novel with 1933's scandalous The Story of Temple Drake, starring Miriam Hopkins. With the Code just beginning to wobble, the 1961 version of Sanctuary provides plenty of sizzle but cannot overcome the inherent weaknesses of the story.

Director Tony Richardson surrenders to the plot's convulsions and does not exhibit much control. The film jumps between scenes, settings and eras with jerks rather than transitions, and with insufficient character depth to cover up the cracks. A governor's daughter disappears in the backwoods and reappears living in a New Orleans brothel, and no one seems to care enough to look for her. She re-enters civilized society with no questions asked.

The psychological turmoil driving Temple to love a criminal like Candy as he rapes and abuses her exists only by extension, and not by any conscious script definition. The motivation for the murder of the infant, once it arrives, is much less than convincing.

Despite the shortcomings Sanctuary provides transfixing adult-level entertainment, the 90 minutes filled with memorable and stark events. Temple's full embrace of life as an exploited and kept woman is presented as a terrifying dance with darkness, Candy Man a metaphor for all that feeds the flesh and destroys the soul. Surrounded by limp drunkards like Gowan, Temple's thrill seeking search for primal masculine danger is almost understandable, and Richardson at least opens the door on the conversation as to what compels some women to seek the embrace of a reprehensible debaucher.

The backwoods scenes are excellent preludes to the characters in Deliverance, and the film takes an intriguing turn towards horror as Temple faces threats from inbred assailants only for the exceptionally well dressed and seemingly out of context Candy Man to emerge as the real gateway to hell.

Lee Remick does her best with the material, but could have benefitted from more scenes to colour in her spirit. Yves Montand is all smoky menace, an almost spectral presence demanding absolute submission.

Sanctuary may lack some credibility and coherence, but compensates with dark magnetism.

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The Movies Of Lee Remick

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

A Face In The Crowd (1957)

The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)

Sanctuary (1961)

Experiment In Terror (1962)

Days Of Wine And Roses (1962)

The Omen (1976)

Telefon (1977)

The Medusa Touch (1978)

The Competition (1980)

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Movie Review: The Omen (1976)

A sophisticated devil-as-child horror thriller, The Omen is a wildly enjoyable romp through evil supernatural territory. A terrific cast and a ridiculously hammy but chillingly effective choral music score help the film on its way to classic status.

On a stormy June 6 night in Rome, American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) faces a familial crisis when his wife gives birth to a son who immediately dies. A priest at the hospital offer a surreptitious solution: another baby boy was born at the same time and his mother died. Robert accepts the switch, and does not tell his wife Katherine (Lee Remick). They name the child Damien. A few years later Robert is appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and the family relocates to London.

With Damien around five years old, mysterious and violent events start to surround the child. His nanny commits suicide. Her replacement Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw) is darkly committed to Damien to the point of disobeying Robert and Katherine's wishes. An evil-looking dog appears at the Thorn estate and Mrs. Baylock insists on retaining the animal as guard dog. Damien suffers a hysterical breakdown near a church. Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton) stalks Robert, insisting that he has crucial information about Damien's birth. Diplomatic photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) starts to notice strange shadows on his prints when he takes photos of people around the Thorn family. When more tragic violence strikes, Robert teams up with Keith to investigate Damien's backstory, a horror-filled journey that will take them back to Italy with a brief detour to the ancient Middle East.

Directed by Richard Donner, The Omen arrived after Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) helped to establish the box office credentials of the devil when surrounded by A-list directors and acting talent. The Omen does not disappoint, and thanks to an existential end-of-the-world narrative, is the most horrifying of the three in terms of lingering impact. Damien's story is established early on as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies for the final apocalyptic battle between good and evil, and while Robert Thorn's anguish is personal, the confrontation carries overtones of a much more destructive showdown. The film mixes drama with creeping anticipation, and unleashes short sharp shocks of pure terror at regular intervals.

After a patient build-up to establish the premise, The Omen offers an unrelenting sense of foreboding, made all the more unsettling because a seemingly innocent child is the centre of the storm. The violence is unflinching and often quite shocking, launched with the spectacular nanny hanging in the most unexpected of settings. Anyone who represents a threat against Damien is then fair game, and Donner effectively builds up to a series of calamities that will befall Katherine, Father Brennan, and others. With a sense of helplessness seeping into Robert Thorn's life as tragic but foretold events come to pass, The Omen manages to shock because the worst that can be predicted nevertheless happens despite ample warning, and in the most dreadful way possible.

The film's power is dramatically enhanced by an Academy Award winning Jerry Goldsmith music score that positively drips with demoniacal intent. The main theme song Ave Satani may mangle proper Latin, but the insanely dedicated chants of Ave Satani and Ave Versus Christus curdle the blood, while the lyrics that translate as we drink the blood, we eat the flesh, raise the body of Satan!, delivered with grandiose treatment worthy of the most ancient Gothic cathedrals, contribute immeasurably to the film's grim mood.

The lead performances from Gregory Peck, Lee Remick and David Warner are functional without necessarily breaking any new ground. It is left to Billie Whitelaw as the literal guardian of evil and Patrick Troughton as Father Brennan to add highly enjoyable and over the top shadings. Whitelaw never had a better screen role, and her tight smile and dark eyes hint at a ferocious will to serve her dark lord. Troughton is tortured as Father Brennan, a man desperately trying to make amends for his role in unleashing hell on earth.

The Omen deliver scares aplenty, and creates an impressively long lasting gloom-laden mood. Damien is here, evil is among us, and the future is uncertain.

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Movie Review: The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

A frothy southern drama, The Long, Hot Summer is a traditional tale of the disruptive outsider creating mayhem in the prevailing dynamics of a sleepy small town. With a hot summer exposing raw zeal, the film serves up rampaging personal agendas.

Ben Quick (Paul Newman) is young, handsome, and carrying a reputation as a troublemaker. Barns seem to go up in flames whenever he is involved in a dispute. After being kicked out of his previous town under a cloud of suspicion but no evidence of wrong doing, Quick arrives in Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi, a hamlet dominated by the Varner family. Will Varner (Orson Welles) is the gruff patriarch, a domineering man who owns all the businesses in town.

But Will's health is not what it used to be, and he is eager to impose his will on his family while he still can. His son Jody (Anthony Franciosa) is supposed to be taking over the family empire, but Will doesn't believe that Jody is up to the task. Jody's favourite pastime is sex with his lusciously flirty wife Eula (Lee Remick), but she is still not pregnant, a fact that does not please Will, who is desperate for descendants. Jody's sister Clara (Joanne Woodward) is not yet married, and time is ticking. She has a tentative suitor in the shape of neighbour Alan Stewart (Richard Anderson), but Alan is a weak man living under the thumb of his widowed mother.

Ben's arrival acts as a stir stick within the Varner family. Will sizes up Ben and quickly designates him as more worthy than Jody of inheriting the Varner businesses. He also considers Ben as a potentially good and virile husband for Clara. Naturally, Jody is not at all pleased at being usurped, while Clara is caught between lusting after Ben and being repulsed by his naked aggressiveness.

Directed by Martin Ritt, The Long, Hot Summer is an adaptation and merging of three works by William Faulkner. The final product is very much in the mold of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, with a large man ruling the roost and having to deal with under-performing offspring.

The Long, Hot Summer is almost impossible not to like. The characters are very much the focus of the film, and there are enough issues in the lives of Will, Jody, Clara and Eula to keep the tension crackling and the emotions boiling. The introduction of Ben Quick into the mix just raises the temperature of an already hot summer by a few degrees, and he is the tipping point as suddenly all plans are disrupted. Jody's future viability is in doubt, Clara's endless wait for Alan is placed under the constraints of a hunky alternative, and Will drives hard towards outcomes that first and foremost serve his legacy.

Ritt keeps it all under control, and the film unfolds with surprising efficiency. The collisions between long-held expectations and new realities are handled with a deft touch. The scenes are relatively compact, the drama moves along at a brisk pace despite the high heat and buckets of sweat. Ritt creates a well-defined small town milieu where the rules are pretty clear until outside forces shake the fine balance, and the future suddenly veers into unknown directions riding on scandal and humiliation.

The cast deserves plenty of credit, as Ritt puts to good use former students of the Actors' Studio and they deliver with verve. Newman is unrestrained and allows Quick to unleash his blunt ambitions to earn a piece of Will's business and chip away at Clara's restraint. Welles matches Newman, and Will's conniving mix of worldly experience and coercive manipulation finds the perfect partner in Ben's youthful combativeness.

Woodward and Franciosa bring plenty of energy into their roles, and both convince as Will's offspring, sharing characteristics with their father but not the whole package. Clara is as determined as Will, but much more circumspect, while Jody tries to be a cut-throat wheeler and dealer but lacks his father's ruthless steeliness. Lee Remick's role as Eula is underwritten, and she can't do much with the young sexpot wife who is starting to awaken to her husband's lack of substance. Angela Lansbury has a relatively small turn as an inn keeper still hoping to melt Will's heart into a late second marriage.

While it builds up plenty of sweltering heat, The Long, Hot Summer does settle for an ending that tilts towards too tidy. The fires do rage, but the resolutions and reconciliations are less than consistent with the previously expressed burning desires. Regardless, the Varner family is forever changed by Ben Quick. Not necessarily better or worse, just less burdened by pretense.

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Movie Review: Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)

An absorbing courtroom drama, Anatomy Of A Murder bids a firm farewell to the 1950s and welcomes a new, much more liberal decade. With sometimes startlingly frank discussions about rape, semen, abuse, panties, and women's sexuality, and a probing of the link between psychiatric condition and criminal acts, Anatomy Of A Murder happily jumps from one taboo subject to another, ushering in a new era.

In small-town Upper Michigan, Paul Biegler (James Stewart) is a former District Attorney, now struggling to run his own home-based law practice. Paul's best friend is old-timer Parnell McCarthy (Arthur O'Connell), a former lawyer but now a confirmed drunk. Desperate for work, Paul accepts a seemingly hopeless case: to defend Lieutenant Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara), who admits to shooting dead a pub-owner called Barney Quill, after Quill raped Manion's wife Laura (Lee Remick).

Laura is stunningly beautiful, dresses provocatively, and can't help flirting with every guy she meets, including Paul. But she insists that Quill did rape her, triggering an uncontrollable rage in Manion. Paul convinces Manion to plead not guilty due to temporary insanity, and sets off to find a medical expert to prove the point. Paul also uncovers the role played by Quill's bartender Alphonse Paquette (Murray Hamilton) on the night of the rape and murder, while McCarthy tracks down the background of the mysterious Mary Pilant (Kathryn Grant). When the trial starts, Paul is up against a shark of a prosecutor in the form of Claude Dancer (George C. Scott), who will do his best to prevent Paul from turning what should be a straightforward murder trial into a rape and revenge case.

The poster art and the angular, playful credit sequence announce the forthcoming change of decades. Anatomy Of A Murder also immediately deploys an enjoyable and innovative all-jazz soundtrack by Duke Ellington (who also makes a cameo), capturing the spirit of a movie tackling serious issues with a light touch. And the Wendell Mayes script wastes no time in going where few movies had gone before, delving into the vocabulary associated with rape cases and courageously portraying the victim as a liberated woman pro-actively seeking the attention of men.

Otto Preminger keeps Anatomy Of A Murder moving along a taut wire for its entire 160 minutes of running time. Cleverly injecting humour to break the tension, and giving equal time to the exploration of murder, rape, and a marriage punctured by jealousy, the film is rich with characters worth knowing and truths worth unveiling. The entire final third is dedicated to the court proceedings, and Preminger creates a dynamic and cavernous courtroom environment with a multitude of perspectives presided over by a caustic but reasonable judge. There are enough colourful events and personalities on show that Sam Leavitt's black and white cinematography is a simplifying relief.

Paul Biegler is one of James Stewart's final great roles. Stewart received his fifth and final Best Actor Academy Award nomination for bringing to life a lawyer who is smarter than he looks, more melancholy than he shows, charming and disarming when needed, and much more dogged than his foes give him credit for. Stewart sparring with the uncompromising George C. Scott in the epic courtroom battle is a duel for the ages.

Lee Remick is the other star of Anatomy Of A Murder. In just her fourth screen role, Remick sizzles as an over-sexed wife attracting the eye of every man she meets, and revelling in the attention. Dressed in pants, high heels and tight tops as she proves too hot to handle for rural upstate Michigan, Laura is a challenge for Paul both in fending off her lustful looks and insofar as her story of rape may have sounded suspicious even to her own husband. In a performance full of refinement, Remick ensures that Laura is convincing both as a seductress and a victim.

Anatomy Of A Murder expertly dissects a case of death by jealousy, and finds within it societal norms already changing and about to be severely disrupted by a decade of tumultuous upheaval.

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Movie Review: Telefon (1977)

A cold war thriller, Telefon has many of the necessary elements to deliver a taut experience, but falls somewhat short on overall talent and budget. The result is a clever but vaguely disjointed action movie that lurches forward in fits and starts.

Rogue Soviet KGB officer Nikolai Dalchimsky (Donald Pleasence) escapes an internal purge against hard-liners and lands in the United States. With his career in tatters, Dalchimsky sequentially activates Soviet sleeper agents programmed through hypnosis to unleash explosive suicide attacks on US military installations. The agents are awakened by receiving a telephone call and hearing a key passage from Robert Frost's poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Unfortunately for Dalchimsky, the targets were selected in the1950s and are now largely irrelevant, resulting in much embarrassment in Moscow and bemusement at the CIA. Major Grigori Bortsov (Charles Bronson) is selected by the Soviet leadership to travel to the US and put a stop to the mounting carnage. Borstov teams up with American double agent Barbara (Lee Remick) and they attempt to track down and eliminate Dalchimsky, with Barbara also tasked with ensuring that there are no loose ends left at the end of the mission.

Echoing themes from The Manchurian Candidate, Telefon does not lack for creativity. The script is based on Walter Wager's book, and it presents an intriguing premise of deep cold war vestiges coming back to destabilize the world when superpower relations are starting to warm. But everything about the movie is just a bit off. The script flirts too often with plastic dialogue. The relationship between Borstov and Barbara creaks instead of smouldering, neither Bronson nor Remick cut-out for the flirting agent role. And Pleasence is dripping with just a bit too much crazed evil, allowing some of the comic Bond villain Blofeld persona to creep into the role.

Despite the shortcomings, there is plenty of entertainment on offer. Director Don Siegel moves the action along briskly, Telefon never sagging in intensity. When Bronson is not asked to spar with Remick, he does what Bronson does best: smoothly slicing through the mayhem to get to his target, thinking on his feet and executing with efficiency. Tyne Daly, Alan Badel, Patrick Magee, and Sheree North maintain interest in the minor roles. And the scenes of sleeper agents completing their suicide assignments have become more unsettling with the passage of time and the preponderance of suicide bombers as routine weapons in actual global conflicts.

Although it may lack some of the glitz and polish of other thrillers, the action is honest and the execution professional. Telefon may not be the quickest to pick up, but it answers the call.

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