Ransom (1974)

Ransom (AKA The Terrorists) is a 1974 British thriller. It was shot in Norway but apparently it was felt that it was best to make the setting a mythical Scandinavian country called Scandinavia. It had a Finnish director (Casper Wrede) and a Swedish cinematographer (Sven Nykvist) but an entirely British cast headed up by Sean Connery. It’s a largely forgotten movie but it’s at least moderately effective.

It’s a hijacking hostage drama made at a time when hijackings and terrorist outrages were regular occurrences.

A British terrorist named Shepherd, along with several of his cohorts, has kidnapped the British ambassador to Scandinavia. They are demanding the release by the British Government of other members of the terrorist gang currently in custody. The British Government intends to accede to Shepherd’s demands but there’s a complication. Other members of this terrorist gang, led by Petrie (Ian McShane), have hijacked a Scandinavian airliner. They are demanding free passage for Shepherd and his accomplices to the airport so that they can all make their escape by air to destinations unknown.

So the hijacking comes under Scandinavian jurisdiction and the Scandinavians intend to accept the terrorists’ demands but double-cross them.

The task of apprehending all of these terrorists without risking any civilian casualties is handed to the Scandinavian chief of security, Colonel Tahlvik (Sean Connery). He thinks that his task is impossible but he’s a soldier and he intends to do the best he can and he most definitely does not like the idea of letting terrorists get away with outrages on Scandinavian soil.

It’s a double hostage drama, with two sets of hostages held in different locations.

The plot gets complicated but it’s perfectly coherent and includes some sound ideas.

There is of course a major twist and it’s signposted by subtle clues scattered throughout the movie. It’s still a pretty decent twist.

Connery as usual exudes charisma.

It should have turned out better than it did. The potential was there. It ends up feeling a bit too much like a TV-movie.

One major problem is that Colonel Tahlvik is the only interesting character. We don’t get any insights into the motivations of Shepherd and Petrie and they’re just not sufficiently menacing. This is a movie that really needed a memorable villain to provide a worthy adversary for Tahlvik, and he needed to be played by an actor with enough charisma not to get totally overshadowed by Connery.

Ian McShane is in fact a fine actor but his performance fails to build up enough steam. He just doesn’t seem to be fully engaged.

John Quentin as Shepherd is a total washout and that is a major weakness.

Most of the movie’s problems would seem to have stemmed from the fact that as director of an action/suspense thriller Casper Wrede was just not up to the job. The action scenes are not exciting enough, the suspense doesn’t build the way it should and there’s a general lack of energy and urgency.

There is some 70s cynicism but it needed to be given a bit more bite.

Visually it’s a fairly impressive film.

This is not by any means a bad movie. It’s decent entertainment but in a TV-movie time-killer sort of way rather than in a nail-biting adrenalin-fuelled feature film sort of way. Worth a look if you can pick it up really cheap or if you’re a Sean Connery completist.

Network’s Blu-Ray lacks extras but looks very good.

Sweet Charity (1969)

Sweet Charity is a 1969 musical directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. It was Fosse’s first feature film. The stage version of Sweet Charity was based on Fellini’s 1957 film Nights of Cabiria, the story of a prostitute’s search for happiness and love.

The 60s was a fascinating period for movie musicals with massive hits like The Sound of Music and huge box-office turkeys like Doctor Dolittle, Hello Dolly, Star and Darling Lili. Sweet Charity turned out to be one of the biggest flops of all.

Charity Hope Valentine (Shirley MacLaine) is a dance hall hostess. She dreams of falling in love. She does fall in love. Often. It never works out.

At the beginning of the movie she’s involved with a sleazebag named Charlie. He’s such an obvious louse that you immediately start to wonder about Charity’s judgment.

Then there’s a handsome charming Italian movie star played by Ricardo Montalban. She makes it as far as his bedroom, but not as far as his bed.

Then she meets Mr Right. He’s Oscar (John McMartin) and he’s as wholesome as freshly baked bread. Of course she can’t tell him she’s a taxi dancer. And what if he discovers that she’s not a virgin!

Lots of emotional angst follows.

It’s not hard to see why this movie flopped. There are so many things wrong with it.

The first problem is that at two-and-a-half hours it’s an hour too long. It is so slow.

Some of the songs are good but most are awful.

It’s an unstructured mess.

The biggest problems stem from what they did to the source material. In Fellini’s movie the heroine is a prostitute. That was changed for both the stage and screen versions of Sweet Charity. Had Charity been portrayed as a hooker the movie would have received an X rating which would have doomed it.

The trouble is that if she’s not a hooker the entire story makes no sense at all. All of Charity’s indulgence in self-pity and shame makes no sense. Oscar’s behaviour stretches credibility beyond breaking point.

And we’re seriously expected to believe that Oscar, a sophisticated New Yorker, is shocked and horrified by the thought that Charity might not be a virgin.

It all comes across as silly and we lose patience with both Charity and Oscar.

And they made her a dance hall hostess? A taxi dancer? In New York City in 1969? A profession that hadn’t been heard of for twenty years.

The only way this bowdlerised version of the story could have worked was as a period piece. In a 1920s, 30s or 40s setting it might have made sense. In a 1969 setting it’s an absurdity.

Some of the dance routines are well done. Fosse’s approach to choreography is genuinely fresh and exciting. But that’s maybe three musical routines in a long long long movie.

The Rhythm of Life number comes across as a desperate attempt to climb aboard the Summer of Love bandwagon. It doesn’t fit in the movie at all.

Visually it’s all over the place. The scenes in the Pompeii Club are excellent - they have a very euro decadent vibe.

I also have to say that I just didn’t warm to Charity as a character.

Sweet Charity just didn’t grab me at all. I can’t in all honesty recommend this one.

The Undercover Man (1949)

The Undercover Man is a 1949 Columbia crime thriller directed by Joseph H. Lewis.

It is obviously inspired by the Al Capone case. It had become clear that there was no way of convicting Capone for racketeering. Then the Federal Government figured out that they didn’t need to. They could get him for tax fraud instead. They didn’t care what they put him in prison for as long as they put him in prison.

The Undercover Man deals with a similar case set in an unnamed city involving an unnamed big-time gangster (referred to simply as the Big Fellow). This is essentially a police procedural. For Treasury Special Agent Frank Warren (Glenn Ford) and his colleagues it’s a lengthy painstaking investigation. They have to go through thousands of accounts, looking for some small slip-up made by the mobsters. This might sound like a boring setup for a movie but in fact it’s gripping and fascinating.

They cannot find a slip-up but they can find a stool pigeon. This seems likely to solve their problems but it doesn’t and it’s back to the grind. But there is always the possibility of another stool pigeon. No matter how terrified the Big Fellow’s underlings might be there will always be someone crazy enough or desperate enough or greedy enough to sell out even the scariest mob boss. T-Men like Frank Warren know this. It’s just a matter of handling stool pigeons the right way, and making sure they don’t become dead stool pigeons.

The focus is on methodical law enforcement work but also on the effect that lengthy tough dangerous cases have on the investigating officers. The dangers are real and the stress is extreme, and the endless frustrations can wear a man down.

Glenn Ford was perfect casting for a role like this. He was a low-key actor and he plays Frank Warren as a man who has mastered the art of keeping his emotions under control. To be a good T-Man you have to be able to function like a machine, but Ford has no problem showing us that Frank really is a man and not a machine. He can switch off his emotions to get the job done but he has a wife and if forced to choose between the job and his wife he would choose his wife. It’s that stubborn underlying decency and humanity that makes him a formidable enemy to monsters. There were few actors as subtle as Glenn Ford.

There’s a very competent supporting cast with Barry Kelley as the very crooked but very clever Mob lawyer O’Rourke being the standout.

Nina Foch as Frank’s wife gets almost nothing to do. That is perhaps deliberate. The focus is on Frank Warren. His love for his wife is a central motivation for him but there’s no need for the movie to get bogged down in the details of his domestic life. Frank Warren and O’Rourke and the battle of wits between them provide the core of the movie.

This is not film noir. It has none of the key ingredients of film noir. It does however have some of the tone and feel of the movies that would later be labelled as film noir. You could say it’s noir-tinged. Mostly it’s a very tough very gritty hardboiled crime thriller/police procedural.

It has a touch of that semi-documentary (or pseudo-documentary) approach that was becoming fashionable in movies like The Naked City. Burnett Guffey’s cinematography helps.

Incidentally there are no undercover men at all in this movie!

Joseph H. Lewis is best-known for Gun Crazy and The Big Combo but some of his more obscure movies such as A Lady Without Passport and Cry of the Hunted are worth tracking down. Maybe The Undercover Man is not quite top-tier Lewis but it’s tense and gripping and it has an authentic feel and it’s highly recommended.

The Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray provides a very nice transfer. The extras include an audio commentary.

Lust for Gold (1949)

The posters might suggest that Lust for Gold, released by Columbia in 1949, is going to be a western. It isn’t. Not quite. It is set in the West but it’s a thriller and the setting is contemporary. Or at least partly.

The original director was George Marshall but he walked off the set early on and producer S. Sylvan Simon took over directing duties.

The movie is based on the story of a real-life lost mine that has never been found.

The movie is about what the title says it’s about. Gold fever. Somewhere in the vast sprawling expanse of Superstition Mountain there is a lost mine (the legendary Dutchman Mine) and a huge hoard of gold. Enough gold to get twenty men murdered over the previous 70 years. If the Apache legends are correct then a lot more men than that have died for this gold.

And nobody knows for sure that there is any gold. Or if there is any chance of finding it.

Young Barry Storm (William Prince) has just seen the twentieth man die on the mountain. Barry’s grandfather Jacob Walz claimed to be the owner of the mine.

Barry becomes obsessed with finding the mine. He finds an old guy who tells him Jacob Walz’s story. This is not so much a main story bookended by a framing story as two distinct stories taking place decades apart both dealing with a search for the mine. There are multiple murders in both stories.

In 1887 Jacob Walz (Glenn Ford) found the mine. The mine had at that time been lost for many years. He becomes involved with a woman who owns a bakery in the nearby town. She is Julia (Ida Lupino). The connection between Julia and Pete Thomas (Gig Young) guarantees that things will get very messy.

What follows is a sordid tale of human depravity. It’s not just the lust for gold. There’s sexual lust, emotional betrayal, jealousy and a web of deceit.

The plot is delightfully overheated. Both stories have wild crazy endings. In fact there’s a third ending and it’s wild and crazy as well.

This is a fairly rare chance to see Glenn Ford as an out-and-out bad guy and yet in his own strange way he’s an innocent and a victim. It’s a credit to Ford’s subtlety as an actor that he can make us feel oddly sympathetic towards Jacob even after we’ve seen him do some breathtakingly vicious things. Ford really is outstanding here.

Ida Lupino is extremely good as a woman who may be thoroughly rotten, partially rotten or just easily tempted or maybe she’s just out of control and has no idea which way she will jump next.

All the characters are reprehensible and yet all are perhaps victims. Men will do terrible things for gold or sex. And women will do equally terrible things. Although without that gold maybe all of these people would have been decent enough. Or maybe not. They have all been corrupted.

This is not a movie that casts humanity in a very flattering light.

I’m always leery of describing movies as noir westerns because in most cases they don’t really fit the noir mould. Having said that there are of course westerns that contain some of the elements that are found in the crime movies that were later labelled as film noir. During the 40s there had been a slight shift towards darker subject matter and a more cynical pessimistic edge in several genres. Lust for Gold falls into that category. It’s part of a trend that began in the 40s, towards harder-edged less conventionally heroic westerns

Ida Lupino can certainly be seen as a femme fatale here, leading every man she encounters to disaster. It might seem like a stretch to see Glenn Ford as Jacob as a noir protagonist (he’s already a very bad man at the start of the movie) but the argument could be made. Perhaps he could be redeemed by love. He does genuinely love Julia. But choosing Julia as a vehicle for redemption is a bad bad choice.

The plot (or plots) gets crazy enough and events spiral so much out of control that although it seems highly likely that things will end badly it’s difficult to predict exactly how disaster will strike. And there’s at least one wild plot twist you won’t see coming.

Lust for Gold is a rather oddball western-thriller genre hybrid and it’s exceptionally interesting. Highly recommended.

The Spanish Blu-Ray looks great. It includes the original English-language version with removable Spanish subtitles.

Sadie McKee (1934)

Sadie McKee is a 1934 MGM production starring Joan Crawford. It’s a pre-code movie. It just made the cut. Had it come out a week or two later it would have been subject to the Production Code. And there are quite a few moments that would definitely not have been permitted under the Code.

Joan Crawford is Sadie, a servant in the household of the extremely rich Alderson family.

Young Michael Alderson and Sadie had had a bit of a childhood crush on each other but of course nothing came of it. She is a servant after all.

Sadie is crazy in love with Tommy Wallace (Gene Raymond). She thinks he’s just swell. But Tommy has to leave town after being caught thieving at his factory job.

In a fit of hopeless romantic passion Sadie decides to go with Tommy to New York. This leads to several very pre-code moments. They find a room to rent. They’re not married so of course Tommy will sleep on the couch. But he doesn’t. They share the bed. And it’s made quite obvious that they don’t share it chastely. But it’s OK, because tomorrow they’ll get married.

There’s trouble in store, in the apartment next door, in the form of Dolly Merrick (Esther Ralston). She’s a night-club singer. She’s glamorous but she’s a cheap blonde and an obvious man-eater. And Tommy has caught her eye. She steals Tommy from Sadie with contemptuous ease.

Now Sadie is stuck in New York and she’s broke. Until she meets Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold). He’s a portly middle-aged tycoon and he’s drunk. He’s alway drunk.

Michael happens to be on the scene and he is convinced that Sadie is a scheming gold digger. It’s obvious to him that Sadie intends to trap the poor hopeless drunken Brennan into marriage.

Maybe because she’s so annoyed at Michael’s obvious contempt for her that’s exactly what she does.

But she still can’t forget Tommy.

This is full-blown melodrama with a whole bunch of classic melodrama twists still to come.

The first thing that makes the movie interesting is that it is pre-code. Which means you cannot assume that it’s heading for a conventional “virtue rewarded and vice punished” ending. In the pre-code era writers could choose to end a story the way they wanted to, rather than the way the Production Code Authority told them they had to end it. And, as a result, at various times the plot suddenly doesn’t go quite where you expected it to.

The second interesting thing about the movie is that Sadie is a woman and she does things for a woman’s reasons. Tommy is a loser and a louse but Sadie is a woman and she loves him anyway and nothing can persuade her to change her feelings. Sadie is a complicated woman. She’s not a stereotypical bad girl. She makes foolish decisions based on pure emotion. She can be calculating and she can be self-sacrificing. She can be cruel and she can be kind. And although she does marry Brennan and his millions in her own way she loves him. But she still loves Tommy. She’s a sympathetic character who can sometimes be unsympathetic. Sometimes she’s just exasperating!

The movie’s third great asset is Joan Crawford who somehow manages to make Sadie’s contradictions believable and manages to persuade us to be on Sadie’s side even when she behaves badly or foolishly. It’s a complex and assured performance.

Edward Arnold is excellent as Brennan. The big problem is Franchot Tone whose wooden performance is particularly disappointing since Michael is a potentially interesting character with contradictory motivations of his own.

Sadie McKee is a melodrama that is both straightforward and not straightforward. And Joan Crawford is great in a tricky role. Highly recommended.

Sadie McKee looks great on Blu-Ray.

The Yakuza (1974)

The 70s was a great decade for Robert Mitchum. The Yakuza in 1974 started a run of notable roles.

It begins with Harry Kilmer (Mitchum) doing a favour for his old pal George Tanner (Brian Keith). He has no choice. Due to something that happened years earlier Kilmer owes Tanner a major favour. Tanner is involved in a business deal with a big-time yakuza named Tono. The deal went wrong and Tono is holding Tanner’s daughter for ransom. Kilmer has to go to Tokyo to rescue her. Tanner sends his bodyguard Dusty (Richard Jordan) along to help.

Kilmer is an ex-cop and and ex-private eye. He’s a fairly tough hombre.

Kilmer is owed a favour by ex-yakuza Ken Tanaka (Ken Tanaka). He agrees to help Kilmer.

The fairly complex plot is not what matters. What matters is the web of obligations that develops. Every action taken by any character seems to involve another obligation.

The yakuza have a code of honour that is as rigid as that of the samurai. Debts must be paid. Obligations cannot be ignored or evaded.

Kilmer is an old-fashioned guy who also believes in honouring debts. Kilmer understands Japan pretty well, having lived there for quite a few years. But he doesn’t understand Japan completely and he doesn’t understand yakuza culture completely.

The fact that several Americans are involved complicates things. There’s Kilmer, there’s Tanner, there’s Dusty and there’s Kilmer’s old friend Oliver (Herb Edelman). Americans don’t necessarily adhere to a code of honour, much less a rigid code like the yakuza code. Kilmer does, but other Americans might not.

Paul Schrader wrote the original screenplay with his brother Leonard. This movie had a troubled production history. Robert Aldrich was the initial choice to direct. Mercifully that didn’t happen. Then Sydney Pollack was brought on board. He was an odd choice for the material. He liked a lot of things about Paul Schrader’s script but Schrader had conceived it as very much a yakuza film and Pollack wanted to focus more on the ideas about obligations and on the culture crash. Robert Towne was brought in to work on the script. In retrospect Sam Peckinpah might perhaps have been a more obvious choice as director.

The Yakuza was a box-office disaster. I suspect that this was partly because in 1974 a yakuza movie would have been very unfamiliar territory for American audiences and critics.

Another problem was undoubtedly the fact that apart from Kilmer the other key characters - Tanaka Ken, his brother Goro and Eko - are uncompromisingly Japanese. Their motivations would have been perplexing and alienating to American viewers. They might have been inclined to judge a woman harshly for putting family duty ahead of love. And would certainly have been puzzled by the fact that Tanaka Ken hates Kilmer but will unhesitatingly risk his life to help him. There is a debt of obligation involved, and that overrides everything. To men like Tanaka Ken a debt must be repaid whatever the cost. And there are no moral shortcuts. If you do someone an injury it’s no good just saying you’re sorry. You can atone, but there’s a price to be paid.

And the movie is not tempted to Americanise these characters, or to soften them or to make them more sympathetic to an American audience. You just have to accept that they see things differently.

Audiences expecting an American-style gangster movie would have been bewildered.

There’s a lot of action and a lot of violence but again it’s not done in classical Hollywood style. The action scenes are more like those you’ll find in a samurai movie. There’s an enormous amount of sword-fighting. In the 1970s a yakuza would still settle a score with a sword rather than a gun.

Mitchum is excellent. Kilmer is an honourable man but now he will have to be satisfy Japanese notions of honour. This is typical 70s Mitchum - he’s world-weary and battered but he will not admit defeat.

The Yakuza has a flavour of its own. It has its problems but it’s fascinating and gripping and it’s highly recommended.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray looks great and includes a director’s commentary track.

American Gigolo (1980)

American Gigolo was written and directed by Paul Schrader and it propelled Richard Gere into the top tier of Hollywood movie stars.

This movie dates from a fascinating transitional period for Hollywood at the tail end of the 1970s, along with movies such as The Eyes of Laura Mars. Hollywood was about to say farewell to the grimy gritty miserable politically obsessed 70s and embrace 80s glamour and decadence. Personally I think it was a change for the better.

The emergence of Richard Gere also paved the way for a new breed of 80s male movie star such as Tom Cruise and, later in the decade, James Spader. Gere was certainly a breath of fresh air after the excessively mannered and contrived performances of 70s stars like de Niro, Pacino, Nicholson and Hoffman.

While the title describes Julian, the protagonist played by Richard Gere, as a gigolo he is in fact a prostitute. A male equivalent of a call-girl. He only services female clients.

He doesn’t try to pretend to himself that he’s not a whore. He talks about turning tricks. He doesn’t feel guilty about it. He just accepts it. He takes pride in his work. It’s not just about being good in bed. He’s charming and amusing and cultured.

Then he meets Michelle (Lauren Hutton). She’s not a client, and yet she is. Of a sort. She’s prepared to pay him for sex. Just as female prostitutes learn a lot about what makes men tick so a male prostitute inevitably learns a lot about what makes women tick. And Julian actually likes women. He knows that Michelle wants more than a roll in the hay. And maybe he starts to want more than that too. Falling for a client is of course not recommended.

And he knows that she’s married.

And then he turns a trick in Palm Springs and it gets a bit kinky. Handcuffs and that sort of thing. That’s not Julian’s scene.

And then there’s a murder. Julian doesn’t see how he could possibly be a serious suspect and he has the crazy idea that if you’re innocent you’ll be OK. Unless someone is trying to frame you. Someone smart and ruthless.

This is definitely a neo-noir of sorts. Julian isn’t quite a classic noir protagonist. He isn’t tempted into crime by some personal flaw. He’s basically a decent guy, and apart from his mode of earning a living he’s totally law-abiding. He isn’t greedy. He likes money but he likes to earn it ethically. He’s drawn into a noir nightmare mostly by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and by the fact that without knowing what is happening he’s hopelessly out of his depth.

And the paranoia level starts to head into the extreme zone.

Michelle is not a femme fatale, except in the sense that getting involved with a woman with a very powerful husband can be hazardous and maybe she’ll drag him down without wanting to. Maybe she’s trapped in some ways as well.

Visually and stylistically this movie has serious neo-noir vibes. To a large extent it established the visual template for 80s/90s neo-noir and erotic thrillers. It’s a great-looking movie. The whole look and feel and tone of this movie marks a break with the 70s.

There’s a slight European flavour. And maybe a dash of artiness, but not in a bad way.

It has a cool detached style. It’s rather minimalist. I love the fact that we get no backstory for Julian. We don’t know a thing about his past. Schrader is confident that we will learn all we need to know about him by seeing the way he behaves now, and he’s confident that Gere is good enough to reveal Julian’s personality without needing to tell us how he feels through dialogue. And Gere is good enough.

Richard Gere is excellent. He’s not immoral but maybe he’s a little amoral. He’s rich but his occupation makes him an outsider. He doesn’t want to undermine society’s moral fabric. He’d just like society to leave him alone.

It’s a movie that avoids politics. It also avoids moralising. Julian does not consider that he is doing anything wrong. Some laws are just stupid and unnecessary.

This movie reminds me a lot of Klute. Both Bree in Klute and Julian in American Gigolo are very good prostitutes because they enjoy giving the client a genuinely satisfying experience. When Bree finds a man who offers her his love she is bewildered and hostile. When Julian finds a woman who offers him her love he has no idea how to handle the situation.

An intelligent slow-burn very stylish neo-noir. Very highly recommended. It would make a fine double bill with The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks good and includes a stack of extras.