Josie McClellan is 37

Some movies we have a soft spot for, even though we shouldn’t. Sometimes girls grow up and change, but the crushes we have on them never fully go away. We’re only human. That’s me saying I have to wish a very happy birthday to Jennifer Connelly.

Too Much Politics

Has there ever been a serious analysis of John Wayne’s late career DIRTY HARRY knockoffs? Maybe a graduate student somewhere wrote a thesis entitled something like, “The Death of America as witnessed by John Wayne: McQ and BRANNIGAN in the shadow of Watergate”. Sounds pretty snappy to me.


In McQ Wayne plays a Seattle cop who beats up punks and uncovers police corruption. In BRANNIGAN he plays a Chicago cop who travels to London to extradite a subject and gets involved in a kidnapping plot. He doesn’t do much in the way of beating up punks, but it’s a good bet that if a punk wandered by he’d be taken care of.


Interestingly, referencing Watergate in relation to McQ actually makes sense as its story of citywide corruption being uncovered by the title character does make sense in light of what was in newspaper headlines at the time. Wayne plays Lon McQ, a Seattle Police Detective investigating the murder of his best friend and partner. He finds himself in the middle of a wave of police corruption and the drug dealers who are searching for a missing stash, or “junk” as characters are continually calling it. McQ actually resigns from the police department relatively early and spends much of the film as a lone gun, becoming more disgusted with what he’s turning up in this world that he thought he knew. “Too much politics,” he mutters as he tosses his badge and gun down. Directed by THE GREAT ESCAPE’s John Sturges, it moves along very much like the work of an old pro who knows what he’s doing. There’s a very good cast of familiar players like Eddie Albert, Clu Gulager, David Huddleston, Julie Adams, Colleen Dewhurst, Al Lettieri and especially the underappreciated Diana Muldaur as the partner’s wife. The Seattle setting, much of it shot on location, is well-utilized but best of all are a few pretty terrific chase scenes, capped off by a final chase along the beach on the Washington Peninsula which is a true beauty.


Yes, there’s plenty of DIRTY HARRY throughout, but there’s also a little bit of BULLITT (a credit sequence that sets up the plot before the main character shows up which features an easy-listening version of the main theme) and THE FRENCH CONNECTION (during one chase McQ drives under a freeway instead of under a subway, in pursuit of a subject). I’d have a problem with all this if it wasn’t so damn cool. And there’s a fantastic Elmer Bernstein score which practically blares out ‘SEVENTIES!’ but is purely and simply kick-ass. The expected double-crosses that the plot contains are never all that surprising after many years of similar cop movies and it’s hard not to notice that Wayne is a little too old to be living on a houseboat and driving a Firebird—seriously, he’s zeroing on seventy and he drives a 1973 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. I also challenge anyone to do a McQ drinking game where the requirement is to do a shot every time we see Wayne walk down a hallway. He seems to spend half the movie doing that.


The actor was already gone by the time the 1980-set NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN takes place but listening to Wayne’s McQ talk about disillusionment in the context of the early 70s, I found myself thinking of Tommy Lee Jones’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and wondered if maybe he’d ever seen McQ. Surely somebody like him must have seen every movie Wayne ever made. What did the Duke’s loyal western-loving audience think of McQ, anyway?

The much lighter BRANNIGAN, directed by Anthony Hickox, followed a year later. Wayne plays Chicago Police Detective Jim Brannigan, sent to London to aid in the extradition of gangster Ben Larkin, played by John Vernon as a stuffier version of his POINT BLANK character. However, Larkin is kidnapped just as Brannigan arrives and he has to work with the English cops to find him and deal with the contract on his life that has been put out.


The opening credits run over exciting shots of Chicago as a Dominic Frontiere score plays(not as cool as Bernstein’s McQ theme, but not bad) and this is followed by a brief appearance by KISS ME DEADLY’s Ralph Meeker as Brannigan’s captain. The first scenes play up how maverick an officer Brannigan is and it’s almost a shame that the entire film didn’t take place in Chicago since Wayne never seems quite as much of a loose cannon as we’ve heard about. Casting such a familiar face like Meeker in a small role almost makes it seem like this is a sequel to a BRANNIGAN set entirely in Chicago. It even brings to mind that BEVERLY HILLS COP sequel never made that would have followed Axel Foley on a case to London.


The kidnapping plot is actually fairly intriguing at the start, but the movie soon focuses as we simply follow Wayne around more than anything. It’s still pretty enjoyable but it seems a wasted opportunity that we don’t get more of Wayne and Vernon facing off against each other. We do get a decent chase scene, a brawl in a pub (“highlight is amusing brawl in pub”, says Maltin) and a track-the-suspect sequence which goes on way too long. Richard Attenborough is fun as the London officer in charge of the case—he’s the one who faces off with Wayne more than anyone, but it never gets too heated. Judy Geeson is very cute as the detective assigned to Brannigan even though we’re never sure if the relationship is supposed to be a flirtation or what—how much younger is she supposed to be, anyway? Lesley Anne Down also briefly appears in an early role. We get a lot of footage of Wayne traveling all around London as well as a plot point used in SPEED years later and an exploding toilet long before one turned up in LETHAL WEAPON 2. But in the end the movie comes up a little short. An anticipated confrontation never pays off as we'd like it to and when the credits roll it feels like there's a big slam-bang setpiece missing that either never got filmed or we simply never got to see.

I say McQ wins this round. It just feels more full-bodied in its story, action sequences, music and overall seventiesness. In both films Wayne of course seems too old to be doing this but even if I’d been there at the time I sure wouldn’t have told him that. It's pretty clear that he still would’ve been able to kick the crap out of me.

Swimming Through the Center of the Sun

The New Beverly is currently running a festival programmed and hosted by Edgar Wright, billed as The Wright Stuff. Wednesday night’s entry was a double bill of two rather legendary comic book films produced by Dino De Laurentiis, FLASH GORDON and DANGER: DIABOLIK, with a few special guests in attendance. Shortly before showtime I was in the lobby when suddenly I was confronted by the sight of Timothy Dalton and Joe Dante embracing. Hey, it’s a LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION reunion! Edgar Wright was standing there between them, looking pleased as punch at what he’d engineered. Back in the theater I spotted DEATH PROOF’s Zoe Bell seated directly across the aisle from me. Sigh. Just another night at the New Beverly.


Dalton of course plays Prince Barin in Mike Hodges’ 1980 updating of FLASH GORDON and was there to do a Q & A with his HOT FUZZ director. The film was preceded by a bunch of trailers for post-STAR WARS sci-fi films like BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, GALAXINA, STAR CRASH, THE BLACK HOLE (a personal Rosebud) and for the Dalton fans, THE ROCKETEER. I can’t explain it, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen the entirety of FLASH GORDON from start to finish. One thing I kept thinking of while watching it was how certain I was that this was surely shot in the stages of Cinecitta in Rome and how I could imagine Fellini storming these sets over the weekend and shooting some impromptu footage. Turns out I was wrong. It was shot in England but the sets and costumes were the work of Danilo Donati who worked with Fellini many times before and after this film. Edgar Wright also pointed out this unique feel that the film has and watching it now, since it’s really not a childhood touchstone for me, that flavor is the most interesting thing about FLASH GORDON. The film feels dated, yes, but except for the Queen music (which, admittedly, is awesome) it doesn’t feel as shackled to the period as things like the BUCK ROGERS show do. Maybe it’s a basic European feel but I kept feeling reminded of a basic mood that can also be found in other De Laurentiis productions ranging from BARBARELLA to DUNE. Even the extensive special effects, while in no way “realistic”, are actually very goofily enjoyable and also correct, considering the artificial tone that is the goal here.


While stars Sam Jones (dubbed by another actor—shades of other sixties productions) and Melody Anderson may be kind of dead wood, there’s more than enough energy from the supporting actors like Dalton himself, Topol, Max Von Sydow as Ming the Merciless, Brian Blessed, SWEPT AWAY’s Mariangela Melato and the spectacularly gorgeous Ornella Muti. Plenty of familiar faces pop up in bits throughout—when you think ‘Is that Richard O’Brien?’ there’s really not anyone else it could possibly be. The film is directed by Mike Hodges who was probably more at home making the classic GET CARTER, but even though I may not be about to become a card-carrying member of the FLASH GORDON cult, it’s a fun movie, especially when viewed with the crowd at the New Beverly.


In the post-film Q&A Timothy Dalton displayed a charm that has been unfortunately absent from too many of his film roles, including when he played James Bond. He may have been visibly taken aback by Edgar Wright’s first question (“Did you f*** Ornella Muti?”) but overall he seemed delighted by the large crowd and how much the audience genuinely enjoyed this film which didn’t do that well here in the states back in 1980. Wright also revealed that Dalton wore a mustache in HOT FUZZ primarily as a reference to this movie.


Joe Dante was on the premises to introduce DANGER: DIABOLIK and, I suppose, give the audience a bit of a Mario Bava primer. Fortunately, I had the impression that a number of other people there were already up to speed on him but Dante is always enjoyable to listen to. He talked a little bit about the director, justly praised Tim Lucas’s epic Bava biography All the Colors of the Dark to the skies and even discussed Dino De Laurentiis, telling the story of how he tried to hire Dante to make ORCA II, capped off by a priceless impression of the producer.


Before DIABOLIK we were treated to trailers for such other sixties epics as KISS THE GIRLS AND MAKE THEM DIE, DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE, OUR MAN FLINT, THE AMBUSHERS. None of which, of course, come close to measuring up to the stylish glories of DANGER DIABOLIK. I’m going to write a full piece on it another time, but for now I’ll just say that each time I see this film I like it a little more. I used to have issues with the episodic nature and how it makes the pace a little pokey and it does, but now I feel more than content to let the movie simply glide along as we revel in the exploits of Diabolik and Eva. The interplay between John Phillip Law and Marisa Mell is spellbinding as they come off as the coolest couple you’ve ever seen. All you can do is dream of being part of a pairing that produces such electricity. As great as the DVD is, the extensive glass matte work by Bava is even more impressive when seen on film. I loved every second of seeing this film again. After a late start, the intros and Q&A the night at the New Beverly ended later than expected so I was a little tired the next day. It was well worth it. DANGER: DIABOLIK has that effect and so do nights like that at the New Beverly.

Special Appearance

In case anyone is interested, the length of screen time that Christopher Lee has in THE GOLDEN COMPASS is roughly equal to how long his screen credit appears. In addition, Daniel Craig’s in the movie for about ten minutes and Eva Green’s in there for maybe five, give or take.


I’m not going to write about THE GOLDEN COMPASS because it doesn’t really interest me, but Christopher Lee’s presence in the film, with a character simply named “First High Councilor”, does. His name isn’t billed in the ads but it is the third and fourth credit among the actors at the end and it’s there in big, booming letters—not even a “special appearance by”-type mention which you’d probably expect for this sort of thing. Getting prominent billing for such a miniscule appearance reminds me there was once a time when Lee’s name would be used as the selling point for a film, even though his part didn’t really warrant it. Maybe it’s THEATER OF DEATH or some Jess Franco film I’ve forgotten, but maybe I’m really thinking of one of the Dracula films where he doesn’t get resurrected until the halfway point and even then he gets next to nothing to do—there are few films other than TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA where the top-billed star has such little screen time. And now here he is, once again, playing a role where he gets great billing in the credits but appears for about the time it takes to buy a soda from a vending machine. Hearing that familiar boom of his voice does manage to make THE GOLDEN COMPASS seem like a real movie for a few seconds, however. It’s nice to know that some things don't change.

Anyway, his part is so brief that I couldn’t find a still of him, so here’s a shot of Eva Green in the film. This will have to do.

Phantom Feelings

There’s a type of thriller that seemed to exist when I was growing up and I almost can’t put into words what the subgenre would be. Dark tales of modest ambitions featuring stars in the lead roles, many set in rural aeas, some about people who have come there from the city. I imagine many of these films beginning with the Avco-Embassy logo as well. I’m not sure I understand what this phantom sort of movie is, but that’s what memory does to you.


Oliver Stone’s THE HAND (featuring an Orion logo at the start, not Avco-Embassy) is one of those movies and yet it isn’t. It’s a straightforward horror thriller, yet it isn’t. It has a performance by an actor who goes over the top, yet he doesn’t. It’s about a killer hand, but no, that’s not really what its about at all.


Michael Caine is comic book artist Joe Landsdale. During a car ride he is having an argument with wife Anne (Andrea Marcovicci, also of THE STUFF and THE CONCORDE: AIRPORT ’79) about the state of their marriage. In the middle of the fight, the two are nearly in an accident and while Caine is waving for a car to get out of the way, it is sliced clean off by the truck who is closely driving in front of them. Robbed of his creativity, Landsdale tries to put his life back together as his marriage crumbles, but he begins to have visions of his hand which was never located after the accident. And what about these visions of violence that he is having? Is he going mad or is the hand simply causing what he wants to happen to certain people?

Made after his Oscar win for the screenplay of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS and his first attempt to film BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (with Al Pacino) had failed, THE HAND is Stone’s second directing effort after the little-seen 1974 horror film SEIZURE. That first film is not particularly good, but it is interesting (the presence of Martine Beswick in the lead role certainly helps). THE HAND is interesting as well, but it never fully works because it seems unsure where to go with its basic idea and how far to take it.


The film’s basic theme of an artist losing control of his creativity is a powerful one but THE HAND seems to take even more interest in portraying the collapse of this marriage. As an exploration of the themes of fidelity and trust, I was strongly reminded of some of David Cronenberg’s THE BROOD, made two years before this. But that film is a good example of Cronenberg’s strengths, while THE HAND plays like the work of a director who is unsure of how to handle the genre. In fact, Stone makes a comment on his enjoyably earnest DVD commentary for the film that he doesn’t think he has the “horror gene”. The sequence where the hand is severed is bloody and effective, no question about that, but it’s clear that Stone would figure out the right path for his directing career soon enough.


The performance of Michael Caine falls somewhere in between his over-the-top rantings in things like THE SWARM and his more acclaimed work from around this time such as DRESSED TO KILL. At first he seems a little too strait-laced to me as this comic-book artist and the main argument at the beginning features him yelling just a little too much. (It frankly plays like Caine overacting as opposed to the character overreacting) On the other hand, when he simply expresses himself and his anger with looks he is very strong (Caine has such great eyes for that sort of thing) and he also seems much more believable, chillingly so, late in the film when he really starts to go over the edge. As his wife, Marcovicci is very good, as well as fetching, and the movie’s portrayal of her never seems to tip in one direction or the other too much. It’s too bad that she never became a more familiar face, though she has achieved a more successful career as a cabaret singer.


Ultimately, Oliver Stone as the director of THE HAND is more interested in the exploration of a character’s descent into madness and the destruction of a marriage than he is in making a movie about a killer hand. That’s all well and good—hey, it’s what I’d be more interested in as well. But he doesn’t seem to know how to use the genre to make those two separate things play off each other. And, as he would probably admit, he doesn’t seem interested in figuring out how he would do that. That’s why I dislike the ending so much, one which screams “let’s reshoot so we can play up the horror angle and go out on an illogical scare” just about more than any other bad horror movie ending I’ve ever seen. Sometimes a director makes a certain movie to find out that he doesn’t want to make that movie. So maybe the best way to look at THE HAND is as a short detour in the path of Oliver Stone’s evolution.

Going Under

A wealthy young man newly married goes in for a risky heart transplant. Shortly after being administered his anesthetic, he realizes that he is still fully conscious but unable to move or speak and will remain so throughout the operation with no way to inform anyone. And with the ability to hear everything going on in the operating room, certain other surprises await him as the operation commences. The plot for AWAKE sounds to me like it could just as easily describe a giallo made in Italy in the seventies, or maybe that’s just my memory of SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS working overtime.

Hayden Christensen is Clayton Beresford Jr., the powerful industrialist who runs his late father’s company and is also devoted to his mother (Lena Olin), though he is secretly dating her assistant (Jessica Alba). He also has a weak heart and is awaiting a transplant, an operation which he expects to be administered by close friend Dr. Jack Harper (Terrence Howard) even though his mother wants the procedure performed by the renowned Dr. Jonathan Neyer (Arliss Howard), so esteemed that he is expected to be the next surgeon general. The situation is complicated by the arrival of Dr. Larry Lupin (Christopher “Shooter McGavin” McDonald) a last-minute replacement for the anesthesiologist. The list of suspicious characters is pretty extensive as Christensen’s character becomes aware of his situation and while a few surprises have already been given away in the trailers, there are some that haven’t.


The basic setup made me think of Italian thrillers made in the seventies and it’s amusing to think of what actors could have starred in a film made from this script (Jean Sorel? Edwige Fenech?) if it had been made back then and it’s easy to imagine that it could have, with a few alterations to the script along with several bottles of J&B lying around. And judging from a twist involving a Christmastime flashback late in the film which seems more than slightly inspired by Argento’s DEEP RED, I can believe that writer/director Joby Harold may have had such films in mind as well.

I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror while defending AWAKE, but the honest truth is that, as silly as the whole thing is, it is kind of involving. Not all of the twists are all that shocking, but I didn’t care. It all plays out as the sort of film that you watch late at night on TV and it succeeds in keeping you awake (to use a word) because you honestly want to know how it turns out. Not everything in the script gets tied together—actually, many things don’t and considering how much the film focuses on the nature of “anesthesia awareness”, even down to an opening crawl informing us of the statistics, it never results in being anything more than a gimmick. Ultimately, it has next to no effect on how a lot of the plot turns out and one very late twist (the Argento-inspired one) doesn’t really have much to do with anything else at all.


Christensen and Alba are both extremely bland, but you kind of knew that already, didn’t you? Fortunately, the supporting actors pick up the slack and provide enough variety that you can easily imagine a few of them in the fantasy giallo version of the film. Lena Olin is excellent as Christensen’s mother—she’s totally there, maybe not knowing for certain just how goofy this whole thing is and McDonald gives an enjoyably off-kilter feel to his anesthesiologist so that you’re not quite certain at first what’s going on with him. And Terrence Howard is given an impossible role to play, being saddled with lots of exposition and motivation which he has to fill in the blanks himself on, but manages to infuse it with a tiny dose of honesty.

It’s only 84 minutes long, it has a crappy rock song over the end credits and there’s very little here to take seriously. And yet I enjoyed AWAKE while watching it. Sometimes I go see a movie that I know is junk and yet I find myself sitting there well into it and suddenly thinking, “Wait a minute…I’ve been paying attention!” I can’t really defend AWAKE and yet I never found it anything less than totally diverting.

At The End Of The Day

CASINO opened Thanksgiving weekend in 1995. People yawned. I’m sorry, were we insane? Were we just too dazed from having seen GOLDENEYE? I admit that the first time I saw it the movie wore me out. Maybe that’s why, to this day, I never like going to see three-hour movies after a long day at work. But the second time, it worked better for me. By the third time, I was thinking, “This is amazing…This is AMAZING.” Before the whole DVD thing happened, my many viewings were on a letterboxed tape, but I wasn’t just watching it multiple times. I found myself absorbing it in pieces, as if I were taking what I needed from the film a little at a time. The structure of it allows you to enter the narrative for a section or two and then you can walk away until the next time you need a hit off it. There are movies where you just want to dive in the deep end and swim around for a while. CASINO is one of my favorite films for doing that.


GOODFELLAS was and is a masterpiece, there’s no arguing that. One long ago interview with Scorsese pointed out that CASINO was like EL DORADO to the RIO BRAVO that is GOODFELLAS. It’s an amusing thought, and gets one to hope that the director will get around to his RIO LOBO one of these days, but it doesn’t hold too much water. EL DORADO was, for Howard Hawks, a case in storytelling of saying, “Instead of this way, we’ll go that way.” CASINO seems to be a way of deepening the themes that were already explored, with richer characters. Whether the real people portrayed in the earlier film had less substance is ultimately irrelevant. But the fact remains that none of them seem to ever have the insight of Joe Pesci’s Nicky being able to sit down when he realizes how bad things are getting and saying, “I fucked up good this time.” Or the pragmatic sense that De Niro’s Ace and Sharon Stone’s Ginger seem to have to call off their fighting for a moment and quietly try to discuss what’s happening. “What if he won’t stop?” he asks. I can back him off,” she answers. None of these bits of insight and humanity seem to do them any good in the end (to allude to a phrase that Sam “Ace” Rothstein seems to like), but for a few seconds there is this glimpse of surprising, recognizable humanity in each of them.

And he has Frank Vincent, out of nowhere deep in the film, confronted with a question, get a voiceover for himself just before he answers it. It hasn’t happened before and it won’t happen again. Who’s to say a minor character in a voiceover-laden film can’t get one little bit to himself? Where is that written? Scorsese gets you asking those questions, continually wanting you to find those answers for yourself.


It’s also hard not to think about the 70s film revolution Scorsese was involved in, a period that he was ultimately one of the few real survivors of. “It turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fucking valuable again,” says Joe Pesci’s Nicky, and he could be talking about any director who was a powerful as Scorsese during that decade. He could be talking about Scorsese. Like Ace, the director survived in ways that don’t even make much sense in movie logic. In the end, his reliance on what he perceived as a sure thing may have led to his downfall but not to his demise. And, in the case of Scorsese, his reemergence after that period.


And I think about Sharon Stone in this film. Maybe she’s crazy, I don’t care. But she takes her aura as one of the last real movie stars and turns in a performance that is so powerful, it makes every crappy movie she ever made irrelevant to me. I think about that elegant shot of her near the beginning when she is first seen. It’s over narration and we never see the shot recur again, but the journey she takes from there, where we see her in the most impossibly beautiful way, to where she ends up, is one that is truthful, fucked-up and ultimately a triumph for her. She’s not so good in the role that she received an Oscar nomination…she’s so good that it’s almost surprising that she got that nomination. This is a film almost entirely populated by men strong, like De Niro & Pesci, and weak, most notable in the ineffectualness of characters played excellently by people you’d expect to be live-wires, like Don Rickles, Kevin Pollack and James Woods. But Sharon Stone as Ginger, the one prominent woman in this group proves herself to be the real wild card, not just in her hustler ways, but in how her sexiness, her ferocity and ultimately her desperation screws up everyone. Ace Rothstein tries to do everything possible to help her, to reason with her but nothing he or anything anyone says can ever get through. De Niro doesn’t have the showy role this time, but all we need to understand everything about him and what Sharon Stone does to him is the look on his face when their eyes lock for the first time and Scorsese freezes on her. That’s all he needs to do.




At the end of the day, CASINO is Scorsese taking his knowledge of film grammar and attempting to expand it to new heights. I can watch it all day and never get bored. In truth, I feel unqualified to write a full appreciation of CASINO, but maybe someday. For now, I will continue to be thrilled by every single shot in the thing.

And that’s that.

Every Penny Of It

When Eva Green as Vesper Lynd first comes into frame well into CASINO ROYALE, she has me right away. I’m a big fan of the movie anyway, but she puts all my feelings about it over the top. Like what happens with several Bond films, you’re waiting for the whole thing to fall apart, but it never does and even after several viewings it still holds together for me. The film pulls off so many things I look for in a Bond film. The tone, the action, the coolness, an actor in Daniel Craig who becomes James Bond in every possible way and a performance by a female lead who is able to live up to playing such a key role in the Bond mythos as Vesper Lynd. She’s smart, elegant and beautiful. She’s stylish, confident and yet it doesn’t take too long for Bond to poke a few holes in that façade. There’s a shyness in there which almost seems so genuine that I have to believe it’s a genuine element of Green’s personality coming through. She puts up a good front and you believe that every eye in the room is on her when she enters. And when Daniel Craig walks in to find her shivering, fully clothed, in the shower, it’s impossible for me not to fall for her and want to take care of her. When I first heard that Eva Green was playing the part it was hard not to think “Of course!” and wonder why I hadn’t thought of it before. And still, she brought to the role more than I would have imagined, just as the film was more than I expected.


If Green doesn’t come to Hollywood, as she has said she has no plans to, I honestly couldn’t blame her considering it’s hard to imagine what sort of studio films she could appear in. It’s hard to imagine her starring in a romantic comedy. And yet, I wish there were six films starring Eva Green in the coming year. A thriller starring her, a good thriller, a real movie, where she is able to play an adult woman in her twenties like she is, as opposed to a “girl”, could be very promising.

If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine myself standing next to Eva Green, seeming as cool as Daniel Craig does. But I can’t close my eyes that hard—even when imagining it I’d still wind up blabbering nonsense instead of getting out an actual sentence to her. That’s just the kind of girl she is. That’s just the kind of guy I am. I’m trying to live with it.

Strangely Attractive

Over the weekend Nikki Finke’s site has been hosting a number of videos featuring high-profile actors in regards to the current WGA strike (for the record, Mr. Peel’s Sardine Liqueur fully supports the WGA in this matter). One of these spots features long-married couple Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss playing a game of charades. Prentiss mysteriously has one arm in a cast and—hang on a second! Paula Prentiss!!?? Really? When was the last time anyone saw her anywhere? How is she? Why does she have an arm in a cast? And why aren’t there ten other Paula Prentiss movies in my DVD collection?


I’ve seen THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT and WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT, there are a few titles I haven’t checked out, there’s her infamous nude scene in 1970’s CATCH 22 but even by the time of that film her popularity seems to have peaked and after that there’s just her supporting roles in THE STEPFORD WIVES and THE PARALLAX VIEW to keep us interested. Why she didn’t become a bigger star in the sixties is beyond me. Maybe it was the collapse of the studio system, maybe she was more interested in marriage to Richard Benjamin, maybe it was a combination of circumstances. What we do have to see her at her best is Howard Hawks’ late career 1964 comedy MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT?, maybe the best starring role she ever had to play. Too bad the film, one of several Hawks disappointments in the sixties, isn’t better.


Rock Hudson plays Roger Willoughby, author of a best-selling book on fishing who is cajoled into taking part in a fishing tournament at the risk that everyone will learn the secret that he has never been fishing in his life. Prentiss plays Abigail Page, the public-relations rep who has to help him keep his secret. It’s most enjoyable these days to those Hawks fans who are already used to his rythyms and preoccupations. That would include me, Quentin Tarantino and maybe a few others. I find myself sitting through it every now and then, but even I have to admit it’s a long two hours, compounded by the fact that it’s a rather dull premise with an uninteresting setting. Maybe there’s a movie in existence that could get me interested in fishing, but this isn’t it. Rock Hudson is playing a role which was conceived for Cary Grant but Grant, who did want to work with his old friend Hawks again, must have realized that this wasn’t prime material and passed on it in favor of CHARADE. So Hawks was left with Rock Hudson, who to put it kindly wasn’t as adept at slapstick as Grant was. And too much of it simply moves too slow anyway, with lots of Mancini music designed to tell us how ‘funny’ everything is. Fortunately there’s a good amount of classic-sounding Mancini cocktail music in the evening scenes. And it goes with the territory—even before they’ve gotten up to the lake where the bulk of the film takes place, there’s already been a number of martinis guzzled, the drinking continues when the fishing begins and Rock Hudson even has a cigarette dangling from his mouth when he’s in a canoe. All this drinking and smoking makes me look forward to the second season of MAD MEN.


But the best part of the whole film is easily Prentiss, tailored out like a classic Hawks chick and with enough enthusiasm for five movies. When I think of the Hawks Chick and everything that means, she’s definitely on the list of actresses that come to mind. Much is made about how Rock Hudson refers to her as 'strangely attractive'. She is that, but she's much more as well. The range of octaves that her voice is able to cover, the razor-sharp wit she exudes and her obvious beauty make her pretty easy to fall for and it’s delightful to see that all of those features are still there in this WGA video, even as she approaches seventy. I’ll watch MAN’S FAVORITE SPORT? again one of these days and I may again be disappointed by it, but I’ll always enjoy her work in the film and imagine a world where Paula Prentiss was a huge movie star.

And I have to say that she and Richard Benjamin look like a very happy couple. Dinner parties at the Benjamin household must be a total blast. I just hope her arm heals soon.

Sifting Through The Mist

In the very first shot of THE MIST we get a look at several striking pieces of artwork as we are introduced to Thomas Jane’s character. We shortly find out he designs movie posters and in fact the pieces of art we see were all drawn by Drew Struzan who, if you looked him, you would learn that he has designed at least a few of your favorite movie posters. We get a little bit of dialogue about this, including a welcome slam at lame photoshopped posters consisting of “two heads” but it’s impossible to notice that in that very first shot one of the posters is very obviously the legendary artwork for John Carpenter’s THE THING. It’s a bold move on writer/director Frank Darabont’s part, reminding us of an inarguable horror masterpiece right of the bat, but one I at first thought was a mistake—after all, how could what we were about to see live up to that memory. Now, thinking back on it, my feeling is that Frank Darabont wasn’t saying he was going to deliver us the next great horror masterpiece as much as giving us a reminder about these great films we used to know and he simply wants to aspire to giving us that feeling once again.

Back in the day Darabont had a hand in the scripts of a few films that I would hold up as examples of eighties horror that I like: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS and the 1988 remake of THE BLOB. Both were directed by Chuck Russell and both pulled off that appropriate feel of what they were supposed to be and is something that Darabont is obviously attempting to return to here (we’ll avoid any mention of THE FLY II). I’m as big a fan of THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION as most of the world is, but not so much his other films. THE MAJESTIC, for one, really is terrible. I would call THE MIST a return to the genre for Darabont, but that kind of undersells it. Instead, it feels like a full embrace of a type of film he’s always loved and maybe misses dearly. In the course of these two-plus hours, he makes up for lost time.

For those who haven’t read the Stephen King novella (I did, but it was so long ago that I remember next to nothing about it), THE MIST is primarily set in a Maine supermarket, just after a torrential storm. As citizens of a small town scramble to buy food and supplies, a strange mist suddenly appears and they quickly learn that it’s not going to let any of them leave there alive. Just about the only thing I do remember about the novella was the mundane effectiveness of the setting and Darabont nails that element which has stayed with me.


Simply put, I think the film of THE MIST works pretty damn well. It’s not perfect—an early sequence heavy in CGI contains some shots which look a little unfinished. I also wish Darabont the director had forced himself to get this thing down to under two hours, as some other early scenes just feel a little too slack. There’s probably a naturalistic flavor the film is going for and at times that succeeds, but at other times it gets in the way of the tension we need to be feeling. Fortunately, the pace soon picks up as it needs to and even the expected CGI effects become effective and even pretty damn scary. The film also has the advantage of a very strong cast in addition to Jane, including Andre Braugher, Laurie Holden, Marcia Gay Harden along with Darabont veterans William Sadler and Jeffrey DeMunn, each of which are played very much as real people, not simply as stock types. But it’s Toby Jones (Capote in the Capote film no one saw) , the supermarket employee who turns out to be more dependant than anyone expects, who steals the movie and manages to get the audience on his side almost more than anyone else. There’s a lot going on in this supermarket during the film and Darabont doesn’t slack off over certain details. The extensive effects don’t overwhelm the actors and the people remain believable, even if some of them out of necessity go as over the top as some might in such a situation.


The mood I was in this Thanksgiving, it wasn’t a day where I wanted a schmaltzy feel good movie. Good thing I chose THE MIST—like the best of King, it’s a dark tale where the humans are as bad as the monsters and the fact that they are recognizably human as this happens makes it all the more terrifying. The film is scary, gory and mean, just as it should be. And the ending, about as dark and unexpected as is possible, was so much the thing I needed on such a day, it made me want to leave the theater doing a jig. It's not from the book, but King apparently approves and it fits in with some of his other work so well it's hard to believe it didn't originate with him. And like all endings of this type, it totally alters the movie and makes it something other than what it had been up to this point. People will hate this film, just as they hated Carpenter’s THE THING back in the day. And while it doesn’t rank alongside that landmark, as time goes on I think people will realize how much Darabont has succeeded in capturing some of the feel of terror that film had. At the very least, it’s earned the right to be mentioned in the same sentence.