Romancing the Stone (1984)

Romancing the Stone was part of the 80s mini-craze for lighthearted adventure movies in exotic settings, a craze kicked off by Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Diane Thomas wrote the screenplay and it was not just her first screenplay but apparently her first real attempt at writing. There’s not much chance of a first-time screenplay getting picked up by a major studio but somehow Michael Douglas got to read it and fell in love with it. At the time Douglas was concentrating on his career as a producer and he knew he just had to produce this movie.

Then came another stroke of good luck. He could not persuade any actor to take the lead role so he was forced to play the role himself. Of course he turned out to be perfect and this movie established him as a very major star.

Getting Kathleen Turner as his co-star was a definite bonus. Hiring Robert Zemeckis to direct proved to be a smart choice.

Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) is a romance novelist. It’s clear that she writes adventure romances in which the heroine always end up with a dashing, brave handsome hero.

Now she gets involved in an adventure of her own. Her sister is being held hostage in Colombia. The kidnappers don’t want money. They want a map that is in her possession. It is a treasure map. Joan will have to deliver the map to her sister’s captors.

She arrives in Colombia and everything goes wrong. It’s bad enough being up against ruthless kidnappers but she is also up against an evil secret police chief. Everybody wants the treasure (which turns out to be a gigantic priceless emerald).

Joan quickly finds herself in big big trouble and she is stranded in the jungle. Luckily a rescuer appears just in time. His name is Jack Colton (Michael Douglas).

He’s not quite the kind of hero you’d find in one of Joan’s books. He’s dashing and brave but he’s cynical and entirely untrustworthy. He is in fact a bit of a scoundrel. He doesn’t rescue damsels in distress unless they can pay cash for his services. Joan disapproves of him and doesn’t trust him but she has no choice.

All sorts of dangers and mayhem and narrow escapes follow. Joan and Jack get some help from a friendly cocaine dealer who happens to be a huge fan of Joan’s novels.

Joan and Jack get chased all over the countryside, they fall off cliffs, are swept away by waterfalls, they have to dodge hungry alligators and they get shot at. They get shot at a lot. The action doesn’t let up. I’m not a fan of Robert Zemeckis as a director but this is the sort of thing he could do well.

Michael Douglas seems to be relishing the opportunity to play a non-intense role as a loveable rogue. We believe Jack as a scoundrel but he has real charm and we can see why a girl like Joan would be swept off her feet by him. And Douglas does the hardbitten action hero stuff well. A fine performance.

Douglas’s old buddy Danny de Vito is great fun as one of the kidnappers.

Kathleen Turner is terrific. Joan starts out very demure and very mousey and very nervous. She gradually becomes more confident and glamorous, as you’d expect since she’s now met a handsome hero. Turner is charming and amusing and very very likeable.

The best thing about this movie is the overall concept. Joan writes adventure romances. Suddenly it’s as if she’s living one of her books, and at the end she does in fact turn her real-life adventure into a bestselling romance novel. This is most definitely not one of those movies in which we’re told at the end that it was all a dream. This adventure does happen to Joan. But of course this is a movie and movies are make believe. So it’s like we’re in an alternative reality which is just like an adventure romance novel. We don’t care that the story is far-fetched. That just adds to the fun and the romance.

No-one watching this movie will care in the least about the emerald. We care about the romance between Joan and Jack. We don’t care who gets the emerald as long as these two find love together.

There’s mayhem but no graphic violence. There’s one very very tame bedroom scene. This is a movie aimed squarely at family audiences and I have no problem with such movie as long as they’re as enjoyable as this one.

It’s a wildly romantic movie but it has enough action and adventure (and humour) to ensure that every viewer is satisfied.

This is just such a fun feelgood movie. Highly recommended.

The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933)

The Kiss Before the Mirror is a 1933 melodrama from Universal directed by James Whale.


Mirrors are the key to this story. A murder is committed because of something a man saw in a mirror. Mirrors can reveal truths that would otherwise remain hidden. The plot also mirrors itself in an interesting way.

Professor Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas ) shoots his wife when he discovers she is having an affair. He knew she was having an affair before he found her preparing to meet her lover. He knew because he saw her face in a mirror. That told him everything he needed to know.

Bernsdorf’s friend Paul Held (Frank Morgan) will be defending him. Held has started looking in mirrors with a great deal of interest. Perhaps a mirror will him something as well. Perhaps it will tell him something about his own wife.

Held starts to understand how Bernsdorf could have been driven to murder. He knows how he will conduct the defence. He must also make a decision about his own case.

There’s pretty much it as far as plot is concerned.

I have major issues with James Whale as a director. I find his movies stagey and annoyingly mannered. The only pre-code movie I have ever truly hated is a James Whale movie (his 1931 Waterloo Bridge). I didn’t like Bride of Frankenstein and found The Old Dark House to be an ordeal to sit through.

But in The Kiss Before the Mirror Whale has a story that is overheated, overwrought, contrived, absurdly melodramatic and theatrical. In other words a story that is a perfect fit for his very artificial directorial style. Whale dials the hysteria levels up to maximum and then dials them up a bit more. This is melodrama on steroids.

The acting is artificial and mannered. I suspect that these were exactly the performances Whale wanted. Frank Morgan as Held and Nancy Carroll as his wife Maria are at least entertaining.

There are lots of things wrong with this movie but it has its compensations. It’s visually quite impressive.

And it deals with touchy subject matter in a way that is both bold and complex, and provocative. It is made very clear that the two wives in question really are betraying their husbands, and really have deceived their husbands. It’s not a case of suspicious husbands jumping to conclusions. There is also no question of the wives being driven to infidelity by unsympathetic husbands. These are loving attentive husbands who do not mistreat their wives in any way. The wives are guilty of betrayal and have no excuses. But of course that is no justification for murder.

Early on Frank Held believes that it is a justification for murder. That does not mean that the movie takes this line. And Held increasingly has doubts. He understands Bernsdorf’s actions but is longer sure that he approves. In his own life Held has to choose between retribution and forgiveness.

There is no hint of a double standard. There is no suggestion whatever that there is any moral difference between a wife’s unfaithfulness and a husband’s.

This is a story of hidden truths and lies and suspicions. As you would expect there are a lot of mirror shots in this movie.

The mirror motif is used very cleverly. The mirrors are not metaphors for female vanity. The mirrors can reveal hidden truths, truths hidden in the eyes of a woman looking at herself in a mirror not knowing that her husband can see what she is revealing. But a mirror might show only part of the truth. Mirrors can reveal truths, but these truths may lead us astray. They do not necessarily tell us what we really need to know. The theme of the movie could be said to be that we need to look into our hearts instead.

I still have issues with Whale’s approach to film directing but this is quite an interesting movie. Recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray release looks fine. Kino Lorber have a knack for coming up with dreary ideologically driven audio commentaries that suck all the pleasure out of movie-watching and this is yet another another example.

Scorpio (1973)

When people talk of 1970s paranoia movies they often neglect to mention Michael Winner’s Scorpio but as well as being a spy thriller it has as much paranoia as the heart could desire.

At the beginning of Scorpio we are introduced to Jean Laurier (Alain Delon). He’s a hitman known as Scorpio. He’s a freelancer but he does a lot of jobs for a particularly sinister organisation. No, not the Mob. They at least have some ethics. He does jobs for a much more sinister outfit who have no ethics at all - the CIA. Scorpio often works with a CIA agent named Cross (Burt Lancaster).

Scorpio opens with the CIA assassinating a Middle East political leader. He’s an American ally but the US Government feels he would be a more useful asset dead. The assassin was Scorpio, working with Cross.

Scorpio had another mission which he failed to carry out. Now the CIA wants that job done. This begins a whole complicated series of events involving possible betrayals and possible double-crosses and lies and manipulations and conflicted loyalties.

Cross is now running. He’s been marked for death by the CIA but Cross is a very clever agent. Catching him and killing him will be immensely difficult and dangerous. You’d need someone as good as Cross. Scorpio is as good as Cross. Maybe.

But there are plenty of twists, and plenty of unanswered questions. Why does the CIA want Cross dead? What is the exact nature of the relationship between Cross and KGB agent Zharkov? They are friends, but strange friendships sometimes do exist between spies on opposite sides. It doesn’t mean Cross has sold out to the KGB, but it might mean that.

Another major unanswered question involves Scorpio’s motivations and intentions. Scorpio is not CIA. He’s a freelancer. Can the CIA trust Scorpio? Can Scorpio trust the CIA. None of the players in this game know if they can trust anyone, and the CIA don’t know if they can trust any of the players, even the guys who are supposedly working for them.

This is not a James Bond-style spy movie. It’s much closer in mood and spirit to the dark cynical pessimistic world of spy movies based on books by writers like John le Carré and Len Deighton - movies like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Ipcress File. The main difference is that Scorpio does also include some great action set-pieces.

It’s interesting that Scorpio loves cats, which I assume is a nod to the first great movie about a hitman, This Gun For Hire (1942).

Casting Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon as the two spies was an interesting decision. Two actors with plenty of star power and charisma but sharply contrasting styles. Lancaster had a tendency to give flamboyant larger-than-life performances. Delon was always super-cool, giving very controlled subtle minimalist performances. Both actors were good at playing dangerous men but they did so in totally different ways. They complement each other perfectly.

Winner is a much reviled director. I suspect he’s mostly reviled because people disapprove so strongly of his monster 1974 hit Death Wish (and they invariably disapprove of Death Wish without actually understanding it). My impression is that a lot of people approach a Winner film in such a prejudiced state of mind that they decide it’s junk before they’ve even watched it.

Scorpio has some very definite affinities with Winner’s excellent 1972 The Mechanic (1972). In both movies there’s an older hitman acting as mentor to a younger assassin. In both cases the relationship is complex. Both movies deal with betrayal. In The Mechanic there’s a single level of betrayal whereas in Scorpio it’s like peeling an onion - you just keep finding new layers of duplicity and betrayal. There are double-crosses and triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses.

To try to pick holes in the plot is to miss the point. To criticise the movie on the grounds that the character’s motivations are insufficiently developed is also to miss the point.

As far as this movie is concerned the world of espionage is a world of meaningless futility.

It is all pointless. It’s just a game. There is no actual objective to the game. The only objective is to strengthen your own position by weakening someone else’s. It’s like a football match in which no player cares whether his team wins or loses.

The purpose of the CIA is to increase the power and influence of the CIA at the expense of other agencies such as the FBI (the CIA guys in this movie regard the FBI as a dangerous enemy.) The characters are all aiming to advance their own interests. The CIA chief McLeod (John Colicos) aims to maintain his position and perhaps move up another run on the ladder. The objective is his subordinate Filchock (J.D. Cannon) is to take over McLeod’s job. Scorpio is an outsider. He’s just a contractor. He wants to become an insider. Then he too will have power. Cross was an idealist once but now he has no idea what his aims are, other than survival. He is amused by the fact that his KGB opposite number, Zharkov, still has beliefs.

What’s interesting is that nobody knows or cares what the case is about. Some secrets were exchanged. Nobody cares what they were. They’re just poker chips.

The CIA are definitely the bad guys but they’re not so much evil as just totally amoral. The characters have no clear motivations because they believe in nothing but the game.

Scorpio is not a meaningless movie. It’s an intelligent provocative movie about the meaningless empty world of espionage. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Winner’s best-known movies, Death Wish (1974) and The Mechanic (1972). You can see certain common themes running through both these movies and through Scorpio as well.

The Face at the Window (1939)

The Face at the Window is a 1939 Tod Slaughter melodrama and if you’ve never seen a Tod Slaughter melodrama I can assure you that it’s a unique experience. And, in my opinion, a wonderful experience.

Tod Slaughter (1885-1956) had had a long career on the stage and was managing his own theatre company as well as acting when in the early 30s he came up with the brilliant idea of reviving Victorian melodrama. At that time everybody had heard of Victorian melodrama but most people had never actually seen one. It was a successful move by Slaughter.

It was obvious that movie adaptations had potential and in 1934 Maria Marten, or Murder in the Red Barn gave Slaughter his first starring film role. It was the first of a string of cinematic Tod Slaughter melodramas. These were popular in Britain and were shown on American television in the 50s.

It is important to understand that The Face at the Window (based on an 1897 play by F. Brooke Warren) is pure unashamed out-and-out melodrama. The title card at the beginning makes that clear. It also makes it clear that we are not expected to take the movie too seriously - we are expected to enjoy ourselves.

This is a crime melodrama and a horror melodrama with even a slight hint of science fiction.

It is Paris in the 1880s. M. de Brisson’s bank has been robbed. A member of the bank staff was killed. The knife in the back indicates that the killer was The Wolf, a notorious madman who had been terrorising the city. His crimes are always preceded by the appearance of a hideous face at a window and by the sound of a wolf howling. M. de Brisson faces ruin, until the Chevalier del Gardo (Tod Slaughter) steps in to restore the bank’s credit.

The Chevalier demands a price for this assistance - he wants to marry M. de Brisson’s pretty daughter Cecile (Marjorie Taylor).

Cecile is horrified and in any case she in love with a nice young man, Lucien Cortier (John Warwick), a teller at her father’s bank.

Now we see the first indications of the Chevalier’s villainy. He frames Lucien for the robbery and murder, in the belief that with his rival out of the way he will be able to persuade Cecile to marry him.

More villainy follows and the love between Lucien and Cecile seems doomed. Only one thing can save poor Lucien from the guillotine and it’s such a fantastic idea that it seems unbelievable.

There are thrills and scares. There are a couple of slightly ghoulish moments. There is romance and of course there is a lovely young girl who may be forced to marry a sinister and sleazy (and lecherous) villain.

You cannot judge a movie such as this by conventional standards. This is not 1930s melodrama. This is melodrama of the Victorian age, done in the manner of the Victorian age. It is supposed to be contrived and outrageous. It is supposed to be over-the-top.

You also cannot judge Tod Slaughter’s acting by conventional standards. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was not trying to do film acting. He was giving the kind of performance you would have seen on the stage in 1897. It’s an artfully contrived and calculated performance. He wants to provoke delicious shudders. He would not have been disturbed had cinema audiences booed and hissed at his character’s perfidious villainy.

It’s all huge amounts of fun. It was clearly done on a limited budget but that works in the movie’s favour. It doesn’t matter that this movie is stagey. That is actually what director George King and star Tod Slaughter wanted.

The Face at the Window is highly recommended.

For years the Tod Slaughter melodramas were available on DVD but in awful public domain releases. The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray on the other hand looks pretty good and there’s an audio commentary.

I’ve reviewed quite a few of the Tod Slaughter melodramas - Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), Crimes at the Dark House (1940) and The Greed of William Hart (1948).

Subway (1985)

Luc Besson’s Subway was released in 1985. This is the movie that established Besson not only as a major force in French cinema but on the international scene as well. Besson has been considered to be part of the late 80s/90 Cinéma du look movement. Opinions on Besson tend to be widely divided. He has been accused of favouring style over substance. He’s also been accused of being too slick and too Hollywood.

I personally much prefer style to substance so that doesn’t bother me.

I do have to admit that The Fifth Element is a total mess. But in its own way it’s a glorious mess.

Subway starts with Fred (Christopher Lambert) on the run after blowing a safe. It’s not clear whether he’s on the run from the police or someone else. The safe belonged to Héléna (Isabelle Adjani). We soon get the feeling that maybe Fred was more interested in Héléna than in the contents of her safe. For obscure reasons she had invited Fred to her birthday party. Héléna is clearly way out of his league. Héléna is very rich, very beautiful and very chic. She is also married.

Whatever his motives Fred took something from the safe (a file) that Héléna’s husband wants back, and he wants it back very badly. The husband is the kind of guy who gets what he wants, or else. It is implied that he is a gangster.

Fred takes refuge in the Paris Métro. He discovers that within the vast underground network of tunnels of the Métro there is a secret world. It is a world of petty crooks and misfits. It is like an entire alternative society.

Fred is both a petty crook and a misfit so he fits right in. Meanwhile he is negotiating with Héléna for the return of that file. Héléna now finds herself becoming immersed in the secret underground world.

Although Inspector Gesberg (Michel Galabru) might not like to admit it he is part of this world. Gesberg is a railway cop, head of the transport police of the Métro. Like Fred and his new friends Gesberg’s whole life revolves around the Métro. He gives no indication of having any private life and displays no interest in anything other than the job, and the Métro. Gesberg has one great ambition in life - to catch The Roller. The Roller is a roller-skating thief who has for months been humiliating Gesberg and Gesberg’s chief subordinate, Sergeant Batman (and yes, there’s an Officer Robin as well). The Roller has befriended Fred. Soon Gesberg has a second ambition - to catch Fred.

It becomes apparent that the biggest danger to Fred is not the police but the goons hired by Héléna’s husband.

Fred doesn’t seem to care. He doesn’t seem to care about anything. He is completely alienated from society.

Increasingly Héléna comes to realise that she too is alienated from her life.

Christopher Lambert’s strange disconnected performance works within the context of the movie. It’s not good acting, but it’s the right acting for this movie.

Isabelle Adjani looks gorgeous and she’s excellent. Michel Galabru is huge amounts of fun as Inspector Gesberg. This is a Luc Besson movie so naturally Jean Reno puts in an appearance. He’s The Drummer. Drumming is his life.

The characters are not terribly important, nor is the plot. The focus of the movie is the Métro and on the secret society that inhabits its darker recesses.

This is a stylish movie but the style comes more from the strange atmosphere of the hidden world rather than spectacular visuals. Besson was going for a distinctive feel. And he achieved it.

Subway is odd but it’s fascinating and mesmerising. Highly recommended.

The UK Blu-Ray from Optimum Home Entertainment is barebones but the film looks lovely and the disc is dirt cheap.

The theme of alienation is also dealt with in Besson’s two greatest movies, La Femme Nikita and Léon: The Professional, both of which I’ve also reviewed.

Non-Stop New York (1937)

Non-Stop New York is a 1937 British murder mystery thriller with much of the action taking place on a new highly advanced transatlantic flying boat.

Jennie Carr (Anna Lee) is an English chorus girl in New York. She’s down on her luck. In fact she’s starving. Then she meets a friendly lawyer. He invites her back to his apartment with the promise of a meal. Surprisingly his intentions seem to be honourable.

We soon find out that he’s a lawyer with some shady associations.

Jennie also encounters a tramp, stealing food from the lawyer’s apartment.

A bunch of rather unpleasant men burst in, it leads to murder and the intruders order Jennie to make herself scarce. The men were of course gangsters.

The chief gangster Hugo Brant later decides it would be unwise to allow a witness to live. Jennie doesn’t know it but she’s marked down to be rubbed out.

Meanwhile the tramp, who is wholly innocent, is arrested and convicted of the murder. He is to be executed.

Lots of complications follow in quick succession. Jennie ends up in prison back in England. She isn’t in for long, but long enough for her not to realise that she is now the missing star witness in a murder trial. And then she finds Scotland Yard Inspector Jim Grant (John Loder) won’t believe her.

All these complications serve to being a motley group of people together on a new luxury airliner capable of flying non-stop to New York. It’s a race against time for all of them. There’s Jennie, there are gangsters who are after her, there’s a blackmailer and a Scotland Yard cop.

It’s all fairly lighthearted and the plot is serviceable rather than brilliant but there are jus enough complications to it to ensure that there is always something happening. The pacing doesn’t falter at any stage in the movie’s modest 69-minute running time.

Mercifully the comic relief is kept to a minimum. It’s mostly provided by a young boy who is a musical prodigy but he is actually quite amusing.

Anna Lee had a very long career but never quite achieved the stardom she deserved. In this movie she’s funny, sweet, charming, sexy and adorable. She has that ability to light up the screen.

Jon Loder is likeable as the Scotland Yard cop. Francis L. Sullivan is deliciously sinister as gangster Hugo Brant and Frank Cellier is fun as sleazy blackmailer Sam Pryor.

The mighty six-engined flying boat looks reasonably impressive and the cool thing about it is that it features a promenade deck - you can step outside for some air mid-flight. It makes a fine setting for a crime thriller and it adds what would have been at the time an ultra-modern feel.

There’s an effective and exciting mid-air action climax.

This is an unassuming but entertaining lightweight thriller with some humour and some romance. It really is good fun. The delightful Anna Lee and the aerial setting are bonuses. Highly recommended.

You have to love the poster - a nude Anna Lee rendered as an aeroplane.

This movie can be found if you’re prepared to do a bit of looking.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer (1933)

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is a 1933 Anglo-French-German co-production. Intriguingly three different versions were shot with three different casts, one version in English, one in German and one in French. The English and German versions survive. This review deals with the English-language version.

It’s also interesting in having been co-written by Curt Siodmak, brother of the great director Robert Siodmak. Curt Siodmak went on to great success as a science fiction novelist and screenwriter (he wrote The Wolf Man).

The F.P.1 is the brainchild of Captain Droste (Leslie Fenton). It’s not an aircraft carrier but a giant floating aerodrome which will be moored in mid-Atlantic. At that time commercial airliners were small and did not have the range to make oceanic crossings non-stop so while the idea sounds odd it did make some kind of sense in 1933.

The movie begins with a burglary that is not what it seems. The burglar is Droste’s buddy Major Ellissen (Conrad Veidt), a famed aviator.

As a result of the burglary that isn’t Ellison meets Claire Lennartz (Jill Esmond). She owns the shipyard that will eventually construct the F.P.1.

There are mysterious plots afoot to sabotage the F.P.1.

A romantic triangle develops between Claire, Droste and Ellison. Both men are hopelessly in love with her. She’s attracted to both men but it starts to look like she will marry Droste.

Two years later the F.P.1 is ready to being operations and then things start to go wrong. It seems that the sabotage attempts have been resumed.

Eventually Claire has to set out on a rescue mission to save the man she loves, Droste. She persuades Ellison to fly the rescue plane. He agrees, because he’s too decent a guy to refuse.

This sets up some decent suspense as attempts are made to save F.P.1 and its crew and the romantic triangle comes to a head.

Leslie Fenton and Jill Esmond were fairly big names in Britain at the time and they’re both good. They give their characters at least a small amount of depth. Droste is a visionary, a driven man, perhaps too much so. Claire is caught between two men and she really doesn’t want to hurt either one. She’s trying not to succumb to the temptation to play them off against each other.

Conrad Veidt is the acting heavyweight here and he’s extremely good. Ellison is a complex man. At first he’s arrogant and ambitious and then, on a long-distance flight, he crashes. He seems to lose all his confidence. His life starts to fall apart. He’s a tortured man but he’s fundamentally decent.

This is borderline science fiction, made at a time when science fiction films were few and far between. I say borderline because the technology is all basically early 1930s. Even F.P.1 itself is probably not something wildly beyond the technology of the time, assuming someone was willing to spend vast amounts of money. It might be more accurate to describe this as a techno-thriller.

While the 1930s aircraft and the crazy floating platform are fun the real focus is on the the three key characters and the interactions between them. Most of all it’s the story of a man who has lost himself. Maybe he will have one last chance to find himself again.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is an oddity but I like interesting oddities and I liked this movie. Recommended.

F.P.1 Doesn't Answer is now available on Blu-Ray from Kino Classics. I don’t know if the Blu-Ray includes the German-language version as well.