Movie Review: The Secret Invasion (1964)

Genre: World War 2 Action  

Director: Roger Corman  

Starring: Stewart Granger, Raf Vallone, Mickey Rooney, Henry Silva  

Running Time: 95 minutes  

Synopsis: In 1943, British Major Richard Mace (Stewart Ganger) assembles a group of imprisoned convicts for a secret mission to open a new front in the Balkans, as a distraction from the upcoming Allied invasion of Sicily. The recruits include the cerebral Rocca (Raf Vallone), cold-blooded killer Durrell (Henry Silva), explosives expert Scanlon (Mickey Rooney), and forger Fell (Edd Byrnes). They secretly land near Dubrovnik, connect with local Partisans, and attempt to free a key target from Nazi captivity.

What Works Well: This war-mission-on-a-budget borrows ideas from The Guns Of Navarone and The Great Escape, and seeds the inspiration for The Dirty Dozen. Director Roger Corman ensures a base level of competence despite limited resources, and the cast contains enough quality (if not necessarily stellar talent) to maintain interest.

What Does Not Work As Well: The plot gets needlessly complicated, including a prolonged stint within a prison that features endless momentum-defeating skulking. The narrative choices range from bizarre (Rocca's finger clicking) to misguided (handing the stone-faced Henry Silva a half-hearted attempt at romance, complete with a cruel mishap involving a baby). Corman confuses noisy, over-long, poorly-staged, and clumsily-edited battle scenes for excitement, a mess made worse by the inexplicable appearance (and sometimes subsequent disappearance) of hundreds of soldiers, first from one side (the Germans), then the other (the Partisans), and then yet another (the Italians).

Key Quote:

Major Mace: Abandoned?! This mission will be abandoned only when all six of us are dead!

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: Green Fire (1954)

A quest-for-riches romantic adventure, Green Fire is more stodgy than fiery. 

In Colombia, mining engineer and adventurer Rian Mitchell (Stewart Granger) discovers a long-lost mountainside emerald mine in rugged terrain. He is attacked by local bandits working for El Moro (Murvyn Vye), rescued by Father Ripero (Robert Tafur), and recovers from his injuries at the nearby fledgling coffee plantation owned by Catherine Knowland (Grace Kelly) and her brother Donald (John Ericson). 

Rian's business partner Vic Leonard (Paul Douglas) is ready to give up on the adventurous life and settle down in Canada, but Rian convinces him to stick around and help activate the mine. Rian starts a romance with Catherine, although she is displeased when Donald gains an interest in mining and redirects resources away from the plantation. The emeralds are elusive, the mine is dangerous, and El Moro claims the land as his own and demands a cut.

Director Andrew Marton reunites with star Stewart Granger after the success of 1950's King Solomon's Mines, but the results in Green Fire are less impressive. Co-writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts adapt the 1942 memoir by Peter W. Rainier, with the on-location filming providing undoubted authenticity and CinemaScope suggesting a grand scale. But the plot and characters are far from memorable, and the details are handled poorly.

The deficiencies are many. With the mine stubbornly yielding nothing and no real adventure to pull the drama along, Rian, Catherine and Vic are caught repeating the same conversations. A rather desperate romantic triangle is tossed into the mix to create artificial tension. The costumes and make-up departments insist on a glamorous look for Grace Kelly no matter the context, and so she is ridiculously dressed in the most expensive outfits while toiling the fields. The climax impressively ignores both physics and engineering by conceiving a plan to blow up a mountain and redirect a river without the slightest nod to even napkin-level calculations.

Somewhere on the mountainside is a half-decent cautionary tale about the destructive dangers of unchecked greed, the limits of friendship, and the nature of sacrifice. But the happy ending imperative means that a silly gun fight is wedged into the plot to produce stock heroics, before love conquers all despite the flies buzzing around the fresh corpses littering the landscape.



All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: North To Alaska (1960)

A comedy western, North To Alaska throws a spiky romance into a rough-and-tumble gold rush.

The setting is the rambunctious town of Nome, Alaska during the 1900 gold rush. Logger-turned-prospector Sam McCord (John Wayne), his friend George Pratt (Stewart Granger) and George's younger brother Billy (Fabian) strike gold, while the conniving Frankie Canon (Ernie Kovacs) is slithering around town looking to get rich without working for it. Sam, who harbours strict anti-marriage opinions, heads to Seattle by boat to purchase mining equipment and escort George's fiancee Jenny back to Alaska.

Sam: Ahh, women! I never met one yet that was half as reliable as a horse!

In Seattle Sam finds Jenny, but she is already married and has forgotten about George. At a swanky nightclub Sam spots French hostess Michelle "Angel" Bonet (Capucine) and invites her to Alaska as a replacement wife for George. She starts to fall in love with Sam, and once in Alaska, Billy also gets infatuated with the sophisticated French beauty. Meanwhile Frankie has a history with Angel, while the region descends into lawlessness with competing cross-claims triggering violence.

Featuring no shortage of comic mass brawls, a few perfunctory shoot-outs (but no casualties) and plenty of trudging through the muddy streets of a recreated Nome, North To Alaska does not take itself too seriously. This is a western light, John Wayne happy to poke fun at his persona as his character Sam McCord is pulled, pushed and shoved into admitting he can, indeed, fall in love with a woman.

Sam: George, a wonderful thing about Alaska is that matrimony hasn't hit up here yet. Let's keep it a free country!

And Angel, a classy prostitute in all but name, is sure able to send Nome into a tizzy. George, Billy and Frankie take turns trying to win her attention, but she decides early Sam is the only man for her and alternates strategic seduction with patience to help his heart yield.

About five different writers had a hand in developing the script, and filming started with no clear direction where the story was going. Director Henry Hathaway could have trimmed the 2 hours of running time, and the disjointed scattershot approach to ideas is apparent. Many scenes meander aimlessly and take forever to get nowhere, with minor characters checking in, leaving no impression, and quietly checking out. 

The subplot about cross-claims erupting into violence is haphazardly tossed into the pot, mainly to justify one messy shootout and another comic highlight involving Wayne in a runaway cart. A loggers picnic in Seattle is a long and tiresome distraction, but even worse is an endless sequence between young Billy and Angel, as the 17 year old tries to act older and falls flat on his face (literally and figuratively).

Michelle: Are you going to leave me here alone?

Sam: Make yourself at home. Billy's here.

Michelle: Who's Billy?

Sam: George's little kid brother.

Michelle: How little?

Sam: Seventeen. But he's man enough to take care of you!

Michelle: That's what I'm afraid of!

The cast buys into the sense of fun and hams it up appropriately, Capucine emerging with plenty of credit as a self-confident and playful woman in a hostile environment. Ernie Kovacs is another stand-out as the oily Frankie, and the film would have benefited from giving him more screen time.

North To Alaska eventually gets to its destination, covered in mud but with a smile on its face.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

 

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.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.