Movie Review: Bengazi (1955)

A clunky treasure hunt for buried gold combined with a romantic triangle all set in a desert milieu, Bengazi is derivative bottom-of-the-barrel adventurism.

In the Libyan town of Bengazi, surrounded by desert, Inspector Levering (Richard Carlson) represents law and order. He starts to investigate the mysterious theft of a heavy duty transport lorry equipped with a machine gun from a British Army compound, and his suspicions rest on John Gillmore (Richard Conte), a shady businessman and the partner of the jovial Robert Donovan (Victor McLaglan) in running the local canteena.

Gillmore intends to join forces with hardhead ex-convict Selby (Richard Erdman), who claims to know the whereabouts of a gold treasure buried in the desert. Donovan gets in on the deal, but the treasure hunt plans are threatened by the sudden arrival of Donovan's estranged daughter Aileen (Mala Powers), looking to reconnect with her Dad. Both Levering and Gillmore are quickly entranced by the new arrival and make advances to win her heart.

Driven by greed, Gillmore, Selby and Donovan use the stolen lorry and make their way into the desert towards the ruins of a mosque where the treasure may be buried, but then find themselves besieged by hostile tribesmen.

A no-budget remix of Casablanca and The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre directed by John Brahm for RKO Radio Pictures, Bengazi is beset by bargain basement production values and fails at everything it tries to do. Any ambitions to combine a plot about greed with a sweaty romantic triangle are quickly thwarted by derivative and unimaginative scripting and barely enough ideas to occupy the paltry 79 minutes of running time.

Most of the ponderous action takes place in the desert ruins with the main characters surrounded by unseen enemies. This makeshift compound is undefended on three sides, and all that needs to be said about the dreadful script is that the hostile forces only ever choose to attack from the fourth side which happens to be fortified with a machine gun.

Meanwhile, Richard Conte and Richard Carlson, in addition to looking too similar, struggle mightily on four fronts: crummy material, limited acting talent, undefined characters and unexplained accents. Bengazi never decides on a central character to park its loyalties with, and so Aileen appears to fall in love with both men for no reason and in next to no time, creating a most unconvincing love triangle.

The dead are buried under the stars and love flourishes amidst the corpses, but nothing saves Bengazi from being hopelessly swallowed by the shifting sand dunes.

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Movie Review: It Came From Outer Space (1953)

A low-budget science fiction film with some suspense elements, It Came From Outer Space has a limited number of decent ideas but delivers them with respectable proficiency.

A space object crash lands in the desert outside a small Arizona town. While everyone believes it to be a meteor, amateur astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson) goes to the crash site to take a closer look and discovers an alien spacecraft. But the crater is then buried in a rockfall and no one believes John, although his girlfriend Ellen (Barbara Rush) stands by him. The local sheriff Matt Warren (Charles Drake), who is also protective of Ellen, is particularly skeptical about John's claims.

But soon strange things start to happen around the town, as the aliens abduct locals and take on their form. John tries to piece together what is going on and what the aliens may be after, but then Ellen is placed in danger and Matt starts to run out of patience.

A combination of ideas featured in the better known The Day The Earth Stood Still and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, It Came From Out Of Space features generally peaceful aliens who are nevertheless happy to take on the form of human abductees for their own purpose. Here the visitors accidentally landed on the wrong planet and hold no ill intent. While the premise is thoughtful, the Ray Bradbury story does default back to the familiar criticism of the human propensity to shoot first at anything different.

The absence of a genuine threat from the aliens blunts the film's edge. Director Jack Arnold resorts to point-of-view shots, his most potent weapon being the apparently hideous look of the aliens (and it's not so terrifying once revealed). Barbara Rush emits a few really loud screams, several of which are false alarms. The tension is limited to John and Matt arguing whether to peacefully step out of the way of the aliens or to attack with all guns blazing, and the debate struggles to sustain the short 80 minutes of running time.

On the positive side, the desert setting and small town location are suitably isolated, the Clifford Stine cinematography is crisp, and Arnold makes the most of his limited budget with decent visual effects for the era. Carlson and Rush are an appealing couple although she could have been given more to do than stand by her man. The Theremin-dominated music score is classic eerie Sci-Fi.

Compact in scope and scale, It Came From Outer Space knows where it's at.

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Movie Review: King Solomon's Mines (1950)

An on-location treasure hunt adventure, King Solomon's Mines offers plenty of exotic safari-style thrills but a rather scarce plot.

Allan Quatermain (Stewart Granger) is a big-game hunters' guide in deepest Africa, growing disillusioned with his life. He is offered a large sum of money by the brother and sister team of John Goode (Richard Carlson) and Elizabeth Curtis (Deborah Kerr) to guide them into unexplored and dangerous territory in search of Elizabeth's missing husband, who disappeared while searching for the mythical treasure of King Solomon.

The journey is arduous, and features many encounters with wild animals, difficult terrain and hostile tribes. But Allan does pick up clues of the missing man's progress and the party pushes on. They meet a fugitive calling himself Smith (Jugo Haas) hiding in a tribal village, and are joined by the mysterious and exceptionally tall local man Umbopa on a mission of his own.

The second of numerous screen adaptations of Sir H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel, the 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines is perhaps the best known. MGM spared no expense, with the story unfolding in colourful settings, against wondrous vistas, and in various exotic African locations. Co-directed by Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton, the film is a sturdy old-fashioned adventure story, enjoyable for the numerous encounters with wild animals but otherwise stretched for content.

In terms of human drama the opening 30 minutes are the most fulfilling. Quatermain is losing his zest for hunting, his sense of living on borrowed time growing thanks to the latest casualty on his team, his enthusiasm waning in inverse proportion to his growing reputation. Elizabeth and John work hard to convince him to lead their ill-conceived search, and finally it's a combination of a ridiculous financial offer and Allan's curiosity about Elizabeth's real motives that engage his motivation.

Once the group move into unexplored territory the humans are sidelined and the animals take over, large and small, individually and in groups, on land and in rivers. King Solomon's Mines settles down to a series of sequential encounters with lions, zebras, giraffes, hippos, elephants, crocodiles, tarantulas, leopards and a massive stampeding herd, to name just a few. It's a dream for lovers of nature and wild animals, but the storyline slows to a crawl, barely afforded breathing room amongst all the hooves, claws and paws.

In between scenes featuring the animal kingdom, the tension between Allan and Elizabeth slowly turns to admiration, in a predictable but chemistry-light romantic subplot. The drama comes back to life late in the film, but the main characters become observers to a stale and poorly defined tribal civil war.

King Solomon's Mines conveys the sweaty beauty of Africa, but fades into a safari trip postcard with a bit of plot on the margins of the pretty pictures.

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Movie Review: Flat Top (1952)

A low-budget US Navy propaganda film intended to drum up recruitment during the Korean War, Flat Top (also known as Eagles Of The Fleet) is a stock story peppered with plenty of grainy stock combat footage.

On board an aircraft carrier during the Korean War, Commander Dan Collier (Sterling Hayden) reminisces about his experiences during World War Two. The rest of the film is one long flashback. In the Pacific theatre, Collier, a strict disciplinarian, takes command of a group of newly trained pilots. Young and exuberant Barney Smith (Keith Larsen) is immediately grounded by Collier for disobeying orders during a landing. Executive Officer Lieutenant Joe Rodgers (Richard Carlson) tries to reconcile the inexperienced men with the expectations of their new commander.

The pilots have to fight long days of boredom at sea. Finally they get into the action and gain experience through raids on the enemy fleet, dogfights with enemy aircraft and finally supporting the Philippines invasion. Throughout, Collier is stingy with his praise, but gradually earns the respect of the men.

Directed by Lesley Selander, Flat Top is approximately 45 minutes of original film supplemented by about 40 minutes of footage from World War Two, or at least it feels that way. The actors are edited into the action but it's often painfully evident where the plastic sets stop and the backscreen projections start. Nevertheless, Flat Top was nominated for an editing Academy Award.

The film was produced with the full support of the Navy by low-budget specialists Monogram Pictures, and by the standards of that studio this is a top rate production. The USS Princeton was the main on-location set, the colour cinematography is courtesy of Cinecolor, and Sterling Hayden and Richard Carlson provide decent name recognition.

But for viewers interested in all the hardware, Selander takes frequent inexcusable shortcuts in cobbling together the action scenes. Characters frequently take off in one aircraft, dogfight in another and land in yet a third type of machine. When a film has to make do with whatever stock footage is available, continuity is an early victim.

The plot is the most standard of military dramas, the stern commander whipping green recruits into shape and his second in command having to bridge the gap between experience and enthusiasm. Hayden and Carlson bring the requisite military stiffness and little else to their roles. Selander tries to give some of the other pilots a bit of personality. But other than the grounded Ensign Smith it's a losing battle, and all the young flyers meld into irrelevance, united by the common thread of contriving to disobey Collier's every instruction.

Flat Top is certainly flat, and not just at the top.

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Movie Review: Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954)

A silly but lovable B-grade monster movie, Creature From The Black Lagoon is a man in a rubber suit, but he's entertaining enough if approached in a spirit of fun.

Deep in the Amazon jungle, Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) and his archaeological expedition uncover a strange skeletal hand with webbing between the fingers, fossilized in a mountainside. Excited at the discovery, Maia travels back to Brazil and joins forces with a group including fellow scientist Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson), his girlfriend and researcher Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), and Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning), and they create a new expedition to find the rest of the skeleton. Meanwhile, back at Maia's base camp, a hideous creature emerges from a nearby lake and kills the two workers assigned to guard the site.

With rustic captain Lucas (Nestor Paiva) at the helm, the expedition travels by boat to the excavation site. There is an undercurrent of friction between David, who cares more about science, and Mark, who is more interested in financial gain and fame. Mark also has his eye on Kay. After failing to find any more pieces of the skeleton, the expedition travels downriver to a lagoon, where they hope to find fossilized deposits. Instead, the half-man, half-fish amphibious and monstrous creature makes its presence known, and a deadly confrontation starts, with the creature trying to kidnap Kay and kill all the men of the expedition.

Creature From The Black Lagoon has limited ambition, and accepted on its own terms as a no-frills monster movie with second tier (at best) talent all around the camera, it delivers campy entertainment.

The film features plenty of impressively clear underwater photography, Universal International and director Jack Arnold eager to show off the emerging capability of filming beneath the waves, as a complement to the original 3-D format of the film. But with the entire movie running for 79 minutes, around 20 of those minutes are invested in mostly languid shots of David, Mark, Kay and the creature swimming in the lagoon, leaving about an hour for the meaningful action. That all the elements of the story fit comfortably within 60 minutes is a good summary of how thin the material is.

The creature outfit has a rather dorky fish head, a scaly body, and an overabundance of rubber. It looks hefty, and more clumsy than scary. Ben Chapman plays the creature, fondly known as Gill-man, on land, where he mostly stumbles around slowly and awkwardly, while Ricou Browning takes over the creature swimming duties, appearing much more lithe and dangerous. By far the best scene in the movie has Kay swimming on the surface and the creature shadowing her from below, parallelling her swim patterns without her knowing, the scene achieving a beauty and the beast balletic elegance.

With the creature itself not too scary, Arnold over-uses to distraction a screechy music score to announce the monster's every intent, in a perfect example of how to reveal desperation in the absence of good new ideas.

The film superficially dabbles in some science versus commerce debates, and more obviously wades into traditional woman-as-the-prize territory as David, Mark and Gill-man form an ungainly triangle of lust around Kay. What exactly the monster would do with Kay should he win her is left to the imagination, but it can't be too good. The sprightly Julie Adams finds every excuse to be in swimsuits or shorts, injecting a healthy promise of sex appeal into the otherwise ominous events at the lagoon.

Part man, part fish, Creature From The Black Lagoon is all kitsch.

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