Movie Review: Quo Vadis (1951)

Genre: Historical Epic

Director: Mervyn LeRoy

Starring: Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov, Leo Genn

Running Time: 171 minutes

Synopsis: In Rome circa 62 AD, victorious military commander Marcus Vinicius (Robert Taylor) returns from a successful campaign to find Emperor Nero (Peter Ustinov) increasingly unstable. Marcus falls in love with the initially reluctant hostage Lygia (Deborah Kerr), and she introduces him to Christian teachings being spread by disciples Paul (Abraham Sofaer) and Peter (Finlay Currie). Marcus' Uncle Petronius (Leo Genn) is within Nero's inner circle, but the Emperor's second wife Poppaea (Patricia Laffan) also exerts influence. When Nero burns Rome for artistic inspiration and then blames the Christians, Marcus and Lygia are caught in the violent consequences.

What Works Well: Massive crowd scenes, lavish sets and costumes, an ambitious scope encompassing Christianity's early days, strong-willed characters, an ardent romance, and a mammoth running time combine to create a grand spectacle. Director Mervyn LeRoy demonstrates agility and control over all the narrative threads and achieves some legendary highlights: the burning of Rome features impressive destruction and large-scale panic, while the scenes of Christians being fed to the lions and burned at the cross are potent and painful. Towering over all the dramatic sprawl is Peter Ustinov's performance as a ridiculous, pathetic, and unforgettable Nero.

What Does Not Work As Well: The opening hour is slow, some of the speechifying is self-consciously solemn, and Robert Taylor only rarely finds the necessary tones.

Conclusion: A fine feast of Hollywoodized history. 



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Movie Review: Logan's Run (1976)

Genre: Science Fiction

Director: Michael Anderson

Starring: Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Peter Ustinov

Running Time: 118 minutes

Synopsis: In the year 2274, surviving humans live in a domed city where all necessities are provided and machine-controlled. Life is dedicated to docile pleasure, but the trade-off is that everyone is killed at 30-years-old in a "carousel" ritual under the guise of renewal. Logan (Michael York) and Francis (Richard Jordan) are Sandmen who pursue runners attempting to flee the renewal ceremony. Logan meets Jessica (Jenny Agutter) and becomes aware of a sanctuary outside the dome where runners can seek refuge and grow old. When his life expectancy is truncated, Logan decides to run.

What Works Well: The loose adaptation of the 1967 novel offers an imaginative premise and poses questions about obsession with youth, compromise between a carefree life and the wisdom of aging, and ultimate central control for the greater good, including mass euthanasia. The set designs are intriguing if also childish. Farah Fawcett and Peter Ustinov appear in small roles. 

What Does Not Work As Well: The narrative is choppy and quickly bumps up against constrained exposition - most of the obvious "why" and "how" questions are unanswered. Some of the special effects are straight from the 1950s, the hairstyles are from the 1970s, and the world outside the dome is borrowed from other sources and inconsistent with the dome's necessity. Given the ambitious scope, Francis is sorely inadequate as the one representation of villainy.

Conclusion: More of a stumble than a run.



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Movie Review: Topkapi (1964)

A heist thriller with strong comic elements, Topkapi features plenty of exotic style and a memorably eccentric cast of characters.

Professional thieves Elizabeth Lipp (Melina Mercouri) and Walter Harper (Maximilian Schell) team up to plot the theft of a priceless dagger encrusted with emeralds from the Topkapi museum in Istanbul. To reduce the ability of international police authorities to track the thieves, Harper decides to recruit a crew of amateurs for the job. Security expert and toymaker Cedric Page (Robert Morley), mute gymnast Giulio (Gilles Ségal) and strong man Hans (Jess Hahn) join the team.

Harper and Elizabeth also hire small-time hustler Arthur Simpson (Peter Ustinov) to drive a car full of hidden weapons and equipment from Greece to Turkey. At the border the hidden cache is uncovered, the Turkish police wrongly surmise that an assassination plot is unfolding and Simpson is pressed into service as an unwilling informant. He weasles his way into Harper's crew, where Gerven the Cook (Akim Tamiroff) also proves to be a disruptive influence.

Despite massive plot holes and some jerky transitions, Topkapi has an irresistible joie de vivre. Directed by Jules Dassin with a sly eye on snazzy visuals and an abundance of smooth style, the film uses an economy of words, relying instead on a bumbling motley crew that threatens to succeed despite itself. Both the thieves and Turkish authorities are experts at getting in the way of their own progress, and the film cleverly celebrates how far a plot can proceed when none of the pieces fit.

Indicative of where Dassin wants to take the film is the character of Arthur Simon Simpson. A sweaty and good-for-nothing tourist swindler, he moves from the margins of the story to somehow find himself in the middle of the action, an unwilling tipster for the Turks and a last-minute stand-in strong man for the thieves, except that he is not that strong and is terrified of heights while his singular heist role requires him to operate on a roof.

Peter Ustinov deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for bringing Simpson to life, in a film where all the performers support the eccentric action. The rest of the characters fade in and out of prominence. The instigator Elizabeth Lipp gradually disappears from the film, the mastermind Walter Harper has a marginal presence throughout, and tinkerer Cedric Page has just a couple of highlight scenes.

Topkapi is famous for a final hour featuring minimal dialogue. First the thieves give the Turkish police the slip at a bustling local festival featuring oiled-up professional street wrestlers, then the heist unfolds at a leisurely pace. The ingenious acrobatics of infiltrating an alarmed room from above without touching the walls or the floor set the standard for clever heists infused with silent tension and no shortage of canny humour.

Elsewhere Dassin injects large amounts of local colour and flavour, bringing the Istanbul streets to life with an explosion of hectic, noisy and vivid activity. Topkapi is as much about a theft as it is about the jet-set having fun in the sun, with either untold riches or imprisonment awaiting at the end of the frolic.

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Movie Review: The Sundowners (1960)

An amiable adventure story set in rural Australia, The Sundowners zooms in on a family grappling with simple but important choices, and provides a satisfying tale of life in the outback.

It's the early 1920s in Australia's back country. Irish immigrant Paddy Carmody (Robert Mitchum) is a sheep drover and shearer, and enjoys his nomadic lifestyle, always on the move, living in a tent, and generally penniless. But his wife of 16 years Ida (Deborah Kerr) and their teenage son Sean (Michael Anderson Jr.) are starting to get tired of the continuous traveling and yearn to settle down, especially once they spot a quaint riverfront farm for sale.

The Carmodys meet resourceful Englishman Rupert Venneker (Peter Ustinov) and he joins them for a large sheep drive that is almost derailed by a wildfire. Ida finally convinces Paddy to accept a steady job for a few weeks at a shearing camp, where she also takes on responsibilities as the camp's cook. The family makes new friends and Ida does her best to save every penny towards a farmhouse down payment, but Paddy enjoys his drinking and gambling, and convincing him to settle down will not be easy.

An adaptation of the Jon Cleary book directed by Fred Zinnemann, The Sundowners is old-fashioned in the best possible way. Featuring no heroes, villains or contrived drama, this is a jovial movie that goes searching for life's small but essential building blocks. The film may lack punch and any memorably epic moments. But with a rich visual style breathing deeply from the Australian environment (Zinnemann insisted that filming take place on-location), The Sundowners builds slowly and effectively, and happily succeeds in making regular folks, with all their flaws, matter deeply as the champions of their own story.

The Carmody family dynamic features plenty of love, respect and joint effort, but also a steady current of tension, conflict and unease as the family reaches a crossroads. The film works as a metaphor for an evolving society, where setting roots is important to build a community and ultimately a nation, but goes against the spirit of the men who tamed the land.

The Sundowners presents both sides of the debate: Paddy is sure that worrying about drought, flooding, crops and fires at a farmhouse is not worth the trouble; he effectively feels that he owns all of Australia, rather than a small patch. Ida is tired of sleeping in a tent. She pragmatically senses the wear and tear of the passing years, and wants a kitchen and house she can call her own. She is also aware that Sean's ambitions may exceed his father's, touchy terrain that Paddy avoids at all costs, and that their son needs a place to call home and help secure an education.

The highlights are derived from routine milestones that turn into major events in any family's chronicle. The wildfire not only threatens the sheep drive but momentarily separates Paddy from Ida, driving home what they mean to each other. Ida is unexpectedly called upon to help deliver a newborn, while all the men are conveniently out getting drunk. Paddy represents his work crew in a shearing contest that does not go as planned.

Each event is another ring in the tree of the marriage between Ida and Paddy, both testing their patience with each other and strengthening their mutual dependency. And as their adventures reach a conclusion, young Sean is called upon to ride a racing horse called Sundowner, and in the unlikeliest fashion the family's fortunes are inexorably linked to the horse's performance.

Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr effortlessly build on the chemistry they established in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Their relationship as the Carmodys has an easy, authentic vibe to it, built on years of joint exploits and still thriving on reservoirs of love and physical lust. Kerr gives Ida plenty of verve and independence without emotionally abandoning Paddy, while Mitchum finds the right tone as a man stuck in the danger zone between masculine instincts to irresponsibly move on, and more evolved imperatives to at least consider doing right by his family.

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Movie Review: Spartacus (1960)

The story of a slave revolt in Italy in the last century before Christ, Spartacus is a grand Hollywood spectacle, filled with a long list of stars and an army of extras. In addition to the grandeur, director Stanley Kubrick creates compelling characters engaging in surreptitious sparring for political dominance.

Strong-willed slave and gladiator-in-training Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) inspires the slaves of Italy to revolt and pursue their dream of freedom. The slaves organize themselves into an army, create a functioning society and march across the country. Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes plotting and backstabbing erupts in Rome, as conniving general Crassus (Laurence Olivier), sleazy senator Grachuss (Charles Laughton), emerging military leader Julius Caesar (John Gavin), and naive commander Glabrus (John Dall) use the slave rebellion to try and outmanoeuvre each other in a great power struggle.

A combination of epic thrills and political gamesmanship, Spartacus has surprisingly few all-out action scenes, as Kubrick keeps the focus on characters and motives. Strong men exert authority and influence both in the countryside and the corridors of government in a stirring display of what it takes to shift the course of history, either for the greater good or personal advancement. Extras are deployed in grand canvasses portraying the journey of the slave army to the Italian shore seeking a naval passage to freedom, but also on a collision course with the Roman legions.

Kubrick also provides due attention to the romance between Spartacus and the slave girl Varinia (an earnest Jean Simmons) to humanize the otherwise larger than life protagonist.

Two less powerful but more memorable characters steal several scenes: Peter Ustinov won an Academy Award for his turn as Betiatus, a slave dealer and gladiator trainer who finds himself having to draw on his substantial shrewdness to survive as he is sucked into the political battle in Rome. Tony Curtis wanders into the movie as Antoninus, a slave boy who escapes his master Crassus and joins the rebellion, becoming a trusted advisor to Spartacus. A restored scene, with master Crassus in the bath seducing his slave Antoninus by talking about oysters and snails, is a sneaky attempt at censor evasion.

The narrative eventually narrows down to a battle of wits between Crassus and Spartacus, and with the weight of the Roman Empire's military might on the side of Crassus, the outcome is never in doubt. Spartacus needs to be satisfied with his men's enormous displays of loyalty, culminating in the "I am Spartacus!" classic scene, and a more hopeful future for the next generation.

Both as an intimate portrayal of courage and a sweep-of-history spectacle, Spartacus thunders with conviction.

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