Movie Review: Breakheart Pass (1975)

Genre: Western Mystery  

Director: Tom Gries  

Starring: Charles Bronson, Richard Crenna, Jill Ireland, Ed Lauter, Ben Johnson, Charles Durning  

Running Time: 95 minutes  

Synopsis: In the 1870s, a military train is on its way to Fort Humboldt ostensibly to deliver essential medical supplies. The mission leader is Governor Richard Fairchild (Richard Crenna), accompanied by his lover Marica (Jill Ireland), while Major Claremont (Ed Lauter) commands the military escort unit. At a rest stop, U.S. Marshal Pearce (Ben Johnson) and his prisoner John Deakin (Charles Bronson) join the train trip. But all is not what it seems, and soon murders and mishaps threaten to derail the journey.

What Works Well: Alistair MacLean adapts his own book and director Tom Gries enjoys constructing an Agatha Christie-type mystery in a western milieu, assisted by a lithe Charles Bronson and a supporting cast deep in talent. The final 30 minutes finally kick into gear and deliver a rousing climax, including a harrowing train-top battle to the death choreographed by veteran stuntman Yakima Canutt. The exterior vistas of the train traversing the landscape are elegant, augmented by a magnanimous Jerry Goldsmith music score.

What Does Not Work As Well: The first hour is more annoying than enthralling, the lack of clarity around plot and motivations leaving the characters dangling. Even once revealed, the conspiracy lands somewhere between incomprehensible and unnecessarily convoluted. For a wanted criminal finally captured by the law, Bronson's John Deakin is afforded a remarkable amount of freedom to skulk around.

Conclusion: And then there were guns.



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Movie Review: Rambo III (1988)

A war action movie, Rambo III moves the series to Afghanistan, but otherwise offers more of the same implausible high body count carnage.

Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna) seeks out John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in Thailand and tries to convince the ex-Green Beret to join a secret mission into a dangerous part of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Rambo refuses, but when Trautman proceeds with the covert assignment anyway and is captured and held prisoner by the brutal Russian Colonel Alexei Zaysen (Marc de Jonge), Rambo volunteers to embark on a one-man rescue operation.

Entering Afghanistan through Pakistan, Rambo connects with local Mujahideen, and witnesses first hand the brutality of the occupying Soviet forces. With Trautman enduring torture, Rambo has to move quickly to invade Zaysen's fort and attempt a dangerous extraction.

After the success of Rambo: First Blood Part II, another sequel was inevitable. But whatever heart and soul was pumping through the series in 1985 was spent by 1988. With the Soviet Union showing signs of both openness and collapse, geopolitical timing did not help the film. By the time Rambo III was released attitudes towards the Soviets were shifting, and the bloodthirsty screen villains did not mesh with the Gorbachev era.

None of which would matter to John Rambo. Plonked down into a different war theatre than his own, the muscular killing machine just goes through the motions with a surly attitude and a dour set expression. Rambo was forged by the jungles of southeast Asia, and the visceral connection just isn't there in the barren landscape of Afghanistan. Director Peter MacDonald, working from a script co-written by Stallone, tries to inject human drama and emotion into the proceedings with a couple of preachy passages ramming home the plight of Afghani villagers and civilians, with an obligatory smart-alecky orphaned child thrown in for good measure, but it's all too textbook rather than organic.

What's left are prolonged action sequences featuring endless explosions, plenty of hardware (the Hind helicopter a particular favourite), and the usual incredible escapes and one-against-many odds that Rambo thrives on. The mayhem is well executed, Stallone gliding through the battlefields with the practiced precision of the hero who will always find a way, no matter the gravity of the situation. Crenna's Trautman gets a larger role this time, acting as both the primary mission objective and later a capable combat partner.

You can take the warrior out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the warrior. Rambo III goes looking for new wars, but barren dust is a poor substitute for thick foliage.

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Movie Review: Wait Until Dark (1967)

A suspense thriller, Wait Until Dark places a blind woman in peril but is otherwise too contrived to be effective.

A doll stuffed with heroin is smuggled across the border on a flight from Montreal to New York and inadvertently ends up in the apartment of housewife Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) and her photographer husband Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). Susy is blind, having recently lost her eyesight in a car crash, but Sam pushes her to be independent. Drug smuggler Roat (Alan Arkin) searches the apartment but is unable to find the doll. He recruits con artists Mike Talman (Richard Crenna) and Carlino (Jack Weston) to trick Susy into revealing its location.

With Sam away at work, Mike pretends to be a visiting army buddy, Carlino pretends to be a crude cop, and Roat pretends to be Roat Sr., a crazy old man, as well as his son Roat Jr. They come in and out of Susy's apartment to try and get her to talk about the doll. At first trusting Mike, Susy starts to grow suspicious of all the visitors, and her only ally is the bratty young teenaged girl Gloria (Julie Herrod), who lives upstairs.

An adaptation of a play by Frederick Knott, Wait Until Dark suffers from an over elaborate plot that strains all credibility. To create the sustained drama in Susy's house, the script has the ruthless Roat concocting a most obtuse plan involving intricate playacting by three criminals, several disguises, a revolving door of comings and goings, a careful schedule of pre-planned telephone calls, signals transmitted by flashing light through kitchen blinds, and a surveillance van.

For the purpose of getting a defenceless blind woman to reveal the location of a doll, none of this makes the least bit of sense, especially after Roat's quick willingness to inflict severe bodily harm to get what he needs is revealed early on.

Director Terence Young hopes that no one notices the massive plot holes, and almost gets away with it thanks to a delicate Audrey Hepburn performance. She generates maximum sympathy as a blind but supremely attentive and smart woman, alone, being preyed on by three goons, and with no one to turn to except her young neighbour.

Alan Arkin is the other big bonus as the fierce Roat, but he disappears for long stretches, leaving Crenna and Weston to carry the bad guy load, and they are merely average.

The stage-bound theatrics rumble on with only moderate moments of suspense, mostly courtesy of Hepburn's acting, until a rightfully famous climax featuring a showdown between Susy and one criminal. The film finally jettisons the amateur playacting and ineffective psychological pressure to focus on attacker and victim, the audience sucked into Susy's dark world of mounting terror with clever use of light.

Wait Until Dark is better when the darkness finally arrives, but all the waiting is problematic.

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Movie Review: Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

A raucous action film, Rambo: First Blood Part II features a one-man army re-fighting the Vietnam War in the name of soldiers left behind.

Vietnam War special forces veteran John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is serving prison time for his role in the events portrayed in First Blood. His former commander Colonel Samuel Trautman (Richard Crenna) secures his release in return for Rambo undertaking a covert mission to photograph a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. The objective is to obtain proof whether or not any former American soldiers are still being held captive.

The mission commander is Marshall Murdock (Charles Napier), based out of Thailand. Rambo parachutes into the Vietnam jungle and connects with his contact Co-Bao (Julia Nickson). They make it to the prison camp, Rambo silently infiltrates the compound, and is shocked to find a large number of American POWs being used as slave labourers. Instead of just taking photographs he rescues one prisoner and heads back to the pre-arranged extraction point, only to learn that the mission is compromised and his jungle adventure is just beginning.

Directed by George P. Cosmatos with a screenplay co-written by Stallone and James Cameron, Rambo is a generally mindless, quite simplistic but also well-executed action film. At the peak of his physical abilities and boasting a superhuman muscularly chiselled torso, Stallone dominates proceedings with a dour performance that starts with scepticism and ends with outright rage at the establishment. More so that the Vietnamese and the Russians, the target of the film's fury is the home front, both for command incompetence and lack of post-war support.

Setting aside politics and messages, the action scenes are the film's lifeblood, and Cosmatos delivers slick jungle battles alternating stealth and cunning with plenty of oversized guns, helicopters and noisy explosions. The final 30 minutes feature barely any dialogue, as Rambo takes matters into his own hands, rewrites the mission and proceeds to unleash the wrath of the wronged soldier on all his foes. None of it is anywhere near credible, but the fun quotient is high.

With the Vietnamese soldiers portrayed as unworthy opponents, Russian  Lt. Col. Podovsky (Steven Berkoff) and his squad of torture-loving henchmen emerge as Rambo's real enemies. Berkoff competes with Napier and Crenna in the battle of the square-jawed supporting actors.

Rambo was a massive hit, spawning numerous knock-off imitators, and reopening questions about the American role in the Vietnam War and the post-war treatment of veterans. Although the superficial criticism that Stallone went back into the jungle and this time single-handedly won the war is valid, the film deserves credit for raising awareness about the need to the separate the treatment of individual veterans from the criticism of an unpopular war.

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The Movies Of Richard Crenna

All movies starring Richard Crenna and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Sand Pebbles (1966)

Wait Until Dark (1967)

Breakheart Pass (1975)

Body Heat (1981)

First Blood (1982)

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

Rambo III (1988)

Rambo (2008, archival footage, uncredited)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Sand Pebbles (1966)

A near-miss epic, The Sand Pebbles is a three-hour drama set in a restless China, with a focus on the unexpected schisms created by stirring geopolitical forces.

It's 1926, the age of gunboat diplomacy in China, with foreign powers keeping military watch to exert power and enforce treaties. Against a backdrop of warring militias, local uprisings, and growing local resentment over foreign presence, US Navy engineer Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) is reassigned to the USS San Pablo, a small gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River. En route to his new assignment, he meets Jameson (Larry Gates), a fiery missionary opposed to foreign meddling in China, as well as idealistic school teacher Shirley Eckert (Candice Bergen).

Holman is a loner with a patchy record, more comfortable running his engine than interacting with people, and he immediately clashes with Captain Collins (Richard Crenna). Collins is happy to have Chinese labourers (known as coolies) look after all menial tasks on the San Pablo as a way to appease the locals, a system that Holman finds wholly unprofessional. The crew includes the thoughtful Frenchy (Richard Attenborough), who becomes one of Holman's few friends, and the brutish Stawski (Simon Oakland).

With local tensions rising and anti-foreigner sentiment reaching a boiling point, Holman trains Po-Han (Mako) to be his new engine room assistant, while Frenchy falls in love with local girl Maily (Marayat Andriane). But trouble is stalking the San Pablo, and soon the gunboat is sucked into the vortex of Chinese nationalism seeking to confront foreign military symbols.

An adaptation of the Richard McKenna book directed by Robert Wise, The Sand Pebbles tackles weighty subject matter with a serious, downbeat tone. The film is more about a sense of time and place rather than action and adventure. Wise invests in setting the scene, establishing context, introducing key characters, and only gradually winds the film towards a rousing climax. The pace is measured, the dialogue sparse, and the rural scenery often quite beautiful. Filmed in Taiwan and Hong Kong over an exhausting seven month production schedule, the settings are exotic, alternating between the busy river, bustling shoreline communities, the grimy bar/whorehouse that caters to the navy men, and the compound that serves as a base for Jameson and Shirley.

Amidst the thoughtful reflections on the unwelcome role of foreign powers in China, the one-sided treaties being protected by gunboats, and the fragmented local population trying to coalesce around a cause, The Sand Pebbles does get distracted by languid treatments of a couple of sub-plots. For questionable reasons Holman contrives to arrange a bare-knuckled boxing bout between Po-Han and Stawski, and the ordeal consumes a large chunk of screen time. Similarly the romance between Frenchy and Maily is filled with slow moving heartache, and appears to be based on not much other than sombre infatuation.

Steve McQueen received his only Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his role as Jake Holman. In many ways it's the prototypical McQueen character, tough, confident, independent and resourceful. But as a long-serving Navy machinist, Holman also has well developed survival skills, and is circumspect and willing to occasionally swallow his pride, waiting for the right moment to act. Crenna, Attenborough and Bergen provide able support, but given its length the film is rather thin when it comes to enduring and memorable secondary characters.

The Sand Pebbles ends on a high, and the final hour provides a handsome pay-off. China begins to shake off its malaise, and an era starts to draw to a close. A giant awakens, shrugs off the dust, and the San Pablo finds itself isolated, surrounded and trapped, the crew forced to endure a long wait before breaking a blockade and pursuing a cause. Collins finds a way for his spirited gunboat to turn potential mutiny into a grab for glory, while Holman finally gets to be part of a team. It's a stand in the face of a nation rising, perhaps heroic and perhaps foolish, and a fine way for a small gunboat to register a footnote in history.

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Movie Review: Body Heat (1981)

About 30 years after the film noir era was supposed to have ended, writer and director Lawrence Kasdan conjures up what may be the best example of the genre.

Body Heat is memorably dominated by oppressive heat: the debilitating heat wave that mother nature has unleashed on Florida; the sensual heat of bodies rubbing against each other; the evil heat of fires caused by arson; and the suffocating heat of the ever-present cigarettes that most of the characters cannot stop smoking. Kasdan grabs control of the temperature dial, cranks to the right, and never relents.

In the middle of this heat, Ned Racine (William Hurt) is a small town lawyer in Florida. He's not a good lawyer, but that does not seem to bother Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), a rich and unhappily married woman who meets Ned and seduces him with all the lust and sex that he can handle. Matty soon has Ned convinced that they need to murder Matty's husband Edmund (Richard Crenna) so that they can together inherit his massive fortune.

They pull off the murder, and Ned's life quickly starts to unravel, as he realizes that Matty is not exactly what she appears to be, and that he may have unwittingly stepped into an elaborate scheme way more complex than he can handle.

Body Heat catapulted both William Hurt and Kathleen Turner into super-stardom, and both are outstanding. Hurt portrays the sleazy and dim-witted Racine as both realistic and sympathetic. Turner, in her film debut, is outstanding as the lethal seductress, attracting and ensnaring Racine with passionate heat that is nothing but camouflage as she coldly manipulates him to serve her plot.

The quirky supporting cast adds to the enjoyment. Ted Danson as the only other lawyer in town and J.A. Preston as the local police detective undergo interesting transformations, from being friends with Racine to suspecting him of murder. Richard Crenna and Mickey Rourke add great depth to the film in minor but critical roles.

Kasdan's script includes many memorable lines and exchanges of dialogue, from Matty telling Ned "You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man", to Ned telling Matty "You shouldn't wear that body". It's all clever, adult, and dangerous, perhaps too witty to apply to all the characters in this movie, but hugely successful as entertainment.

In all its elements, Body Heat simply crackles.

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Movie Review: First Blood (1982)

There was a time when action movies could deliver entertainment without resorting to a cartoonish computer-generated special-effects laden climax every 10 minutes. First Blood is a reminder that an action movie can be remarkably low key in its setting and character development, and yet deliver a strong punch when based on a message inspired by real events and memorable personalities.

Sylvester Stallone, when he was famous but not yet a joke, is John Rambo, a Vietnam war veteran back in the US who is devastated to find out at the beginning of the film that the sole other combat survivor from his Special Forces unit has succumbed to cancer.

In a representation of the poor welcome home afforded to most Vietnam vets, Rambo is treated badly by the Sheriff (Brian Dennehy, who puts in an excellent but slightly exaggerated performance) and police force of a small local northwest town. The maltreatment triggers the soldier to revert back to war mode in the surrounding hills and forests (the movie is filmed in and around the town of Hope, British Columbia), and soon the war expands to include the clueless local contingent of the National Guard, who are as over-matched as the police, and Rambo gradually draws the conflict back to a final showdown within the town.

Richard Crenna arrives as Rambo's field commander and mentor, and as the police and National Guard are scurrying around pretending to know something about warfare in the forest, Crenna delivers the classic line to Dennehy: "I don't think you understand. I didn't come to rescue Rambo from you. I came here to rescue you from him."

First Blood is part of Hollywood's thoughtful post-Vietnam war examination of the conflict, an era that resulted in large scale epics like Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979), as well as smaller scale films like Coming Home (1978) and Platoon (1986).

Stallone would subsequently achieve stratospheric commercial success with Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which while undeniably entertaining, unfortunately sacrificed nuance in favour of a jingoism.

In First Blood, Rambo is a hero who feels pain both emotional and physical, bleeds, has to tend to his wounds, tries to stop the conflict before it escalates, and spares the life of most of his enemies. Directed by Ted Kotcheff and running an efficient 96 minutes, First Blood delivers its message with uncommon integrity.

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