Movie Review: The Last Of Sheila (1973)

A mystery thriller, The Last Of Sheila is clumsily mounted and poorly executed.

In Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheila is killed in an unsolved hit-and-run. A year later, her film producer husband Clinton (James Coburn) invites six members of the film world, all potential suspects in Sheila's death, to spend a week on his yacht in the Mediterranean.

The invitees are fading film director Philip (James Mason), starlet Alice (Raquel Welch) and her husband/manger Anthony (Ian McShane), talent agent Christine (Dyan Cannon), struggling writer Tom (Richard Benjamin) and his wife Lee (Joan Hackett).

Clinton introduces them to a mystery game they will play during the week, with each assigned a secret card denoting a transgression, with one to be revealed every night through a treasure hunt style contest at successive ports of call. Mishaps start to beset the yacht, and suspicions emerge that Clinton may have a sinister motive related to Sheila's death.

Directed by Herbert Ross, The Last Of Sheila is co-written by actor Anthony Perkins and musician Stephen Sondheim. The lack of writing discipline is evident in a muddled premise, lack of character development, a midway jarring change in tone, and a tired, highly illogical resolution featuring dozens of late-arriving factoids introduced in inept flashbacks. This was a troubled production beset by on-set tensions betrayed by distracted and incohesive cast performances.

The mystery, once revealed, is far beyond plausible, The Last Of Sheila falling into a trap of trying to justify a murder solely for the pleasure of the script. Along the way, the first half of the film rushes towards an ill-defined game, but only plays two out of six find-the-sinner rounds before abandoning the concept altogether in favour of a stage-bound Agatha Christie whodunnit, absent a clever detective.

The morsels of enjoyment are few and far between, and include Mason digging deep to try and salvage the outcome late in the proceedings, with the grounded Joan Hackett the only other cast member appearing to care. A clever clue appears early in the film and offers a late blip of a pulse upon re-emerging towards the otherwise limp finale.

The Last Of Sheila carries some potential, but is fumbled into the murky Mediterranean waters.

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Movie Review: 100 Rifles (1969)

A clumsy western, 100 Rifles boasts some decent star power but is otherwise bereft of style, substance and significance.

The setting is Mexico early in the 20th Century. American police officer Lyedecker (Jim Brown) goes looking for half-breed bandit Yaqui Joe Herrera (Burt Reynolds), who stole $6,000 from a Phoenix bank. But Joe has already used the money to purchase 100 rifles he intends to hand over to peasant revolutionaries. Local woman Sarita (Raquel Welch) witnessed her father's hanging by the brutal General Verdugo (Fernando Lamas), and joins the rebels.

Lyedecker just wants to get on with the business of transporting Joe back across the border to face justice, but he cannot avoid getting caught up in the peasants' struggle. An attraction also develops between him and Sarita. Eventually Lyedecker, Sarita and Joe team up to help the rebels launch audacious attacks against the army in the name of freedom from oppression.

Directed and co-written by Tom Gries, 100 Rifles is busy, noisy, and cheap. Unconcerned with characters or any semblance of coherent plot, the film jolts along from one shoot'em-up set piece to the next, linked together by lots of scenes of lots of people riding lots of horses across the landscape.

The three main characters share no chemistry. Reynolds struggles to convince as a scrappy rogue, Welch radiates her brand of pouty sex appeal but is given nothing else to work with, and Brown is most let-down by a dead-on-arrival script that creates the character of a strong, black stand-up officer of the law and then just allows events to swamp him. Brown and Welch are thrust into some then-daring interracial sex scenes, but the result is more jousting than lovemaking, validating rumours of rampant on-set tensions between the two.

Dan O'Herlihy hangs around the film as a train company executive not quite sure what his role is supposed to be, while Eric Braeden is a German advisor lurking next to General Verdugo. Nothing better than throwing in a random corporate suit and a menacing Nazi predecessor as distractions from a limp story.

The action scenes are mindless but executed with reasonable panache, Gries carving out some individual space between dominant Spaghetti Western sensibilities and the genre's more familiar traditions. And at least nothing in 100 Rifles lasts for too long. With no patience for any sort of meaningful build-up or artistry, the film lines up the scenes of rebel and army extras exchanging gunfire and mows then down with admirable efficiency.

Humourless and witless, 100 Rifles contains plenty of firepower, but most of it is misdirected.

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Movie Review: Fantastic Voyage (1966)

A unique science fiction adventure about a group of miniaturized scientists traveling through a human body, Fantastic Voyage is full of bright ideas brought to life with energetic execution and admirable special effects.

The US is embroiled in a secret race with the Soviet Union to master miniaturization technology for military purposes. Scientist Jan Benes defects to the US, but suffers a brain injury in the process and slips into a coma. Benes has key knowledge that could help in overcoming the 60 minute limit currently hampering miniaturization efforts. At the secret Combined Miniaturized Deterrent Forces facility, General Carter (Edmond O'Brien) recruits agent Grant (Stephen Boyd) to provide security on-board the experimental submarine Proteus, which is about to be miniaturized and injected into Benes' bloodstream to find and remove the damage affecting his brain. The rest of the submarine team consists of Captain Owens (William Redfield), human physiology expert Dr. Michaels (Donald Pleasence), laser surgeon Dr. Duval (Arthur Kennedy) and his assistant Cora (Raquel Welch).

Carter and Grant suspect that there is a traitor within the group, and once the journey starts inside Benes' body, little goes according to plan. Michaels suffers from claustrophobia, the submarine is buffeted by turbulence and knocked off course. The laser surgery tool is sabotaged, and the sub suffers an air supply leak. A re-route requires a dangerous trip through the heart, forcing Carter to order that Benes' heart be temporarily stopped. With time running out, the crew decide to take a hazardous short-cut through the inner ear to the brain, but again there are problems, as the mission is jeapordized by the unknown traitor and Benes' own body working to defend itself against the foreign objects floating within it.

Combining a 1950s sci-fi mentality with 1960s special effects, Fantastic Voyage is visionary kitsch. With the space race in full swing and the cold war at high heat, there is no denying the inventiveness of turning the exploration theme inwards, and transforming the concept of flying through endless space into navigating the smallest capillaries of the human body. The Harry Kleiner screenplay (with four others sharing story and adaptation credits) efficiently introduces the set-up, and cleverly integrates the not-yet-perfect miniaturization science into the cold war tension, with secret military labs and threats from saboteurs thrown in to create numerous opportunities for drama.

Director Richard Fleischer and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo then weave together the visuals, and create a creditable environment with a succession of stunning backdrops mostly inspired by ocean depths. For the most part, the special effects have held up remarkably well.

The adventures of Proteus within the human body are never dull, the incredible obstacles and dangers of traveling through the human body becoming a thrill ride heightened by the subversive attempts to sabotage the mission. Fleischer constructs the film in the form of an obstacle course with a surprise around every corner. The scientists are forced to rely on their ingenuity to problem solve on the fly, including frequent excursions out of the submarine to circumvent, fix, or innovate their way through the latest crisis.

Slightly less successful are the goings-on back in the secret lab as anxious military and medical types monitor the mission's progress. Some of the buffoonish attempts at tension and humour in the control room do not work, and fully deserve the parodies that they inspired in films like Airplane!.

The performances are generally bland, and this is a good thing, since there is enough stimulation in the premise, backdrops and special effects not to require flashy acting. Stephen Boyd, Donald Pleasence, Arthur Kennedy, Raquel Welch and William Redfield maintain an even keel. For the most part Welch remains subdued and is surprisingly convincing as a scientist's assistant. She stays under the wraps of her mundane submariner outfit, although late in the film she starts forgetting to fully zip up her top. Kennedy's Dr. Duval attempts some clunky philosophizing inspired by the journey through the human body, at regular intervals spouting weighty but meaningless musings about humanity, life and the order of things.

Innovative, audacious and sometimes campy, Fantastic Voyage lives up to its name.

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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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