Movie Review: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967)

Genre: Historical Gangster Action  

Director: Roger Corman  

Starring: Jason Robards, George Segal, Ralph Meeker  

Running Time: 100 minutes  

Synopsis: It's 1929, and rival gangs vie for control of the lucrative illegal alcohol trade in Chicago. Al Capone (Jason Robards) is convinced his rival George "Bugs" Moran (Ralph Meeker) cannot be trusted, and flashbacks reveal the history of reprisal attacks between their syndicates. Capone now orders his henchman Jack McGurn (Clint Ritchie) to organize a hit on Moran, who is equally intent on eliminating Capone. The levels of violence increase as St. Valentine's Day approaches. 

What Works Well: Using a narration-heavy docudrama style, the plot is faithful to the known facts leading to the notorious abolition-era bloodbath. Working with a decent budget and for a major studio, director Roger Corman still adheres to an economical no-wasted-scenes ethos, and recreates the late 1920s with crisp sets filled with vintage cars and wardrobes. A drawn-out fight between gangster Peter Gusenberg (George Segal) and his moll (Jean Hale) is a treat, while Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson appear in small roles.

What Does Not Work As Well: The story is limited in scope to violent gangsters intent on killing other violent gangsters, and boredom sets in early. Every character receives a dry staccato introduction (birth year, birth city, arrest record, marital status, gang role, cause and date of death), but none of them are afforded a soul or emotional depth. Jason Robards chews the scenery in several sputtering over-the-top scenes, while most of the other goons are interchangeable villains in suits. Despite the sparkling aesthetics, the visuals never escape the studio backlot. 

Key Quote:

"Bugs" Moran: I say it's time we put Capone and his bums out of business...for good.

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Movie Review: The Naked Spur (1953)

A taut western, The Naked Spur gets under the skin of five distinct characters engaged in a lethal battle of wits.

Rancher turned bounty hunter Howard Kemp (James Stewart) teams up with veteran gold prospector Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell) to track down fugitive Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), wanted dead or alive for murder. Disgraced ex-soldier Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker) joins Howard and Jesse, and the trio capture Ben and his girlfriend Lina (Janet Leigh).

Howard had intended to use the $5,000 bounty on Ben's heads to repurchase the ranch he lost when his ex-lover betrayed him. Jesse and Roy now want their share of the reward money, and as the tense group make their way to Abilene, the resourceful Ben sets about exploiting the tensions between his three captors. An encounter with Blackfoot tribals adds further complications.

A journey driven by greed, complicated by uneasy alliances, and stirred by a charismatic fugitive desperate to save his neck from the hangman's noose, The Naked Spur is a dark, complex western. Carrying worthy echoes of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, the script by Sam Rolfe and Harold Jack Bloom presents five flawed character with disparate personal aspirations, and director Anthony Mann conjures up delectable moral dilemmas and psychological gamesmanship.

The third western collaboration between director Mann and star Stewart, The Naked Spur provides Stewart with one of his most intriguing characters, immediately placing the drama on dangerous ground. Howard Kemp is no stand-up hero looking to do the right thing. Instead he is deeply damaged by a love gone wrong, and has now defaulted to a stance of personal greed seeking to redress a sense of deep injustice. Indeed, the script hints Kemp chose Ben as his prey because he is the easiest target compared to genuine hardened outlaws.

While Kemp does his best to dissuade Jesse and Roy from claiming a share of the reward, they have their own issues to deal with. The aging Jesse has dedicated a lifetime to the futile pursuit of gold, a fading dream Ben can easily exploit. And the roguish Roy is on the run and desperate for the additional firepower a group can provide. 

Further intrigue is introduced by Lina and her spiky relationship with all the men. She immediately senses both Howard and Roy making moves towards her; and is shocked when the ever enterprising Ben encourages her to lead them both on, introducing a romantic duel as another potential crack to weaken the already rickety alliance against him.

With just the five speaking parts, Mann is able to delve deep into his characters, the fascinating multi-dimensional conflicts playing out against a lush landscape of forests, cliffs, caves and roaring rivers along the slow but dangerous trail to Abilene. As tensions run high, acts of betrayal and unexpected heroism converge towards moments of truth. With trust in short supply and no unity of purpose, few objectives are fulfilled, The Naked Spur a harsh exposition of the difference between superficial desires and soulful needs.



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Movie Review: The Anderson Tapes (1971)

More weird than good, The Anderson Tapes mixes under-cooked caper with poorly defined conspiracy and yet the result is oddly pleasing.

Safe cracker John "Duke" Anderson (Sean Connery) is released from prison and immediately makes his way to New York City and into the arms of Ingrid (Dyan Cannon), his former mistress. She now lives in a swanky apartment building, and the gears in Duke's head start to turn: all the units in the relatively quiet building look rich and relatively easy to break into. Oblivious to the watchful lenses of a multitude of surveillance cameras belonging to various government and private agencies scattered throughout the city, Anderson starts assembling a team.

The Kid (Christopher Walken) is an electronics expert who was in prison with Duke; Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam) is an antique dealer who can help identify and then sell the valuable items in each apartment; and Jimmy (Paul Benjamin) is the driver. Finally, the tottering "Pop" (Stan Gottlieb) will impersonate the doorman to keep watch in the lobby. The plan will be financed by mobster Pat Angelo (Alan King), but he insists on an unexpected twist that causes disarray: tough guy "Socks" Parelli (Val Avery) has to be part of the team.

The Anderson Tapes introduces an undercurrent of unease due to all-pervasive surveillance running amok in modern society, and as Anderson and his crew plan the robbery, their every move is surreptitiously tracked by various unnamed government agencies using audio and film recordings. None of the G-men appear to be talking to each other and the Frank Pierson script makes the point that capturing volumes of information and putting it to good use are two different things. None of the dots are connected, the robbery plan isn't disrupted, and the in-progress police response is triggered by a paraplegic boy using a ham radio connected through Hawaii. 

The central robbery as conceived by Duke Anderson is such a sure-fire disaster that some moments start to unintentionally descend to Pink Panther farcical territory. The robbery unfolds at a pace slow enough to make the tortoise look good, and the bungling burglars wear masks yet call each other by name in front of witnesses while shuttling up and down the building bundled into a slow moving elevator. With half of the New York police force assembled in the street waiting for Anderson and his crew to conclude their plodding work, the robbery becomes a predictably calamitous train-wreck unfolding in slow motion.

With Quincy Jones providing a jazzy music score, director Sidney Lumet makes good use of the acting talent at his disposal. Sean Connery puts in a good shift trying to distance himself from the Bond persona, and notably makes no attempt to hide the thinning hair. Anderson is a jailed criminal when the movie opens and confirms himself as a failed criminal, his unsophisticated methods as far as imaginable from suave assuredness.

In support, Dyan Cannon provides Anderson with a professionally opportunistic bed partner, Christopher Walken makes his studio film debut as the mop-haired electronics expert (and, in a further example of a bad plan going awry, somehow becomes a safe-cracker during the course of the robbery), and Martin Balsam plays the gay antique trader with a barely concealed smile. But the real over-the-top performances come from Val Avery as the always-about-to-boil-over henchman Socks and Ralph Meeker arriving late as puff-chested police Captain Delaney.

By the time Meeker starts issuing bizarre orders to his men and Avery starts punching victims up and down the building in a perfect example of how to cause an unnecessary ruckus at the worst of times, The Anderson Tapes concludes that criminals can and will find ways to shoot themselves in the foot, regardless how many cameras and microphones are recording their every dense move.

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Movie Review: Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

A staggeringly effective film noir that plumbs the depths of abject fears propelled by the Cold War's promise of nuclear annihilation, Kiss Me Deadly is a small story that just happens to be about dark forces unknowingly toying with the possible end of the world.

In the dead of night, hard boiled, bottom-feeding private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) picks up desperate hitch hiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman, in her film debut) on a lonely rural road outside of Los Angeles. Christina is wearing a trench coat with nothing underneath and has just escaped from a mental institution. She pleads with Hammer to "remember me" should anything happen to her. Sure enough, they are intercepted by a gang of thugs. Hammer receives a knock-out blow to the head; Christina is tortured and killed. Both are placed in Hammer's car and thrown off a cliff. Hammer survives, recovers, and with the help of his trusted assistant Velda (Maxine Cooper), starts to investigate Christina's story.

Hammer fends off police detective Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy) as a convoluted thread leads to Christina's former room-mate Lily Carver (Gaby Rogers), who is quick to put on a threatened sex-kitten act and asks Hammer for protection. Soon Hammer uncovers a locker key cleverly hidden by Christina. In the locker is a mysterious and seemingly dangerous light-emitting device. The nefarious Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), expert torturer, Christina's killer and Lily's co-conspirator, is eager to get his hands on the hidden contraption. Lily, Soberin and Hammer engage in what turns into a deadly battle to recover the devastatingly powerful energy weapon.

Kiss Me Deadly is a story of bottom-feeders racing to the abyss. The supposed hero, Mike Hammer, is worse than any of the low-lifes he investigates. Typically hired to snoop on cheating spouses, he resorts to blackmail and entrapment to maximize his fees, and even pimps-out Velda to create more infidelity as needed. In his pursuit of Christina's story, Hammer is a brute, breaking one man's precious music record for kicks and trapping another man's fingers in a drawer to get his attention.

Wanton violence is in Hammer's blood, and he becomes the perfect hard-skulled man to chase after the ultimate weapon of destruction, a box-sized nuclear device hidden under America's nose. The other evil-doers are either two-faced or faceless, Lily playing the waiting game and letting others do the dirty work, while Dr. Soberin's shoes are more prominent than his face, his army of interchangeable henchmen irrelevant.

The script by A. I. Bezzerides does not care about the who and why of the weapon; when widespread carnage and the potential for final extinction is the outcome, the what is the only thing that counts, and Kiss Me Deadly draws its terror from having exactly no one in control of technology packing a horrific outcome.

Ralph Meeker brings Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer to life with a sardonic smile, a perpetual cigarette, and an expression that acknowledges everyone is heading for the same final exit, but some will have a more exciting experience along the way. Maxine Cooper, in her debut, emerges as the major secondary role. Cooper creates a Velda who is both Hammer's victim and source of strength, the woman he abuses and depends upon. She suffers through it because she sees something worth loving in him, which is the main blemish on her judgement.

As with many great detective stories, Kiss Me Deadly loses its linear coherence early, director Robert Aldrich finding all the edgy camera angles and drenching the screen with enough fatalistic grit and raging sexuality to render logic superfluous. Once Hammer embarks on his quest to uncover Christina's backstory, Aldrich alternates overdoses of masculine violence with gushing feminine lust, Hammer intimidating every man standing in the way of the truth and encouraging every woman willing to throw herself at him. For good measure, Aldrich throws in a scene of Hammer talking with Velda as she just happens to be performing sensuous ballet stretches, mixed-in with stripper-pole twirls, in form-hugging clothing.

On the way to confronting bombs that can end the planet's liveability, there is no real need to ask any rational questions: it's just Hammer time.

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