The Anderson Tapes (1971)

The Anderson Tapes is a 1971 Sidney Lumet movie and the fact that I generally dislike Lumet’s movies put me off seeing it for years.

On the other hand it’s a heist movie. And it’s a 70s paranoia movie. And it’s all about surveillance. These are all things I like a lot.

Robert Anderson (Sean Connery), known as Duke, has been in prison for ten years. That will prove be significant. He’s known as a very skilled and professional safe-cracker but the world has changed in ten years. Duke doesn’t really understand the ramifications of new technology for his kind of old school criminal.

He has a plan to rob an apartment building. There are six apartments, all inhabited by very rich people with all sorts of valuables - cash, negotiable bonds, jewels, paintings, objets d’art, coin collections.

He needs financing to set his scheme up and he gets it from the Mob. A very big Mob boss owes him a debt of honour.

There’s another ticklish complication. A little task that the Mob wants him to do for them.

Anderson puts together a team. The heist is intricately planned and it’s a good plan. There’s one problem. The authorities have Anderson and everyone else involved under surveillance. Not just one government agency, but a whole bunch of them - the narcotics bureau, the FBI, even the IRS. They’ve been under surveillance right from the start. Every movie they’ve made has been taped, photographed and filmed.

This is a movie in which everyone is being watched all the time. This was 1971, when the surveillance state was still in its infancy, but this movie is already taking a deep dive into tech paranoia.

The usual formula for a heist movie is that a master criminal comes up with a plan, we see the detailed planning and the rehearsals and then when the plan is finally put into operation something inevitably goes wrong. In this movie everything has already gone wrong right from the start.

When we come to the heist Lumet gets a tad tricky, with the narrative jumping back and forward between the present and the future. It’s a bit risky but he pulls it off rather well.

One very cool thing about this movie is that it features so much incredibly cool analog technology that was absolutely cutting edge in 1971. The Feds even have a super-computer, with punch cards and flashing lights just like a proper computer. And ham radio plays a key role, which is amazingly cool.

Connery gives a standard Connery performance but that’s OK because that standard Connery performance is always fun to watch. And he did tweak that standard performance for different films. In this one he lacks Bond’s charm and humour.

Dyan Cannon is quite good as his girlfriend. Christopher Walken, in his first significant feature film role, is good as a young crim befriended by Anderson in prison. Martin Balsam is there as well, as reliable as ever. Ralph Meeker is a riot as an uber-tough cop.

The heist itself occupies a very large chunk of the running time and it’s superbly done. There are only occasional moments of violence and that’s why they work and why they hit hard. Suddenly it’s not a game. And suddenly the guys who thought they had everything under control realise they’ve been fooling themselves.

The Anderson Tapes is a fine exercise in suspense and paranoia. This is easily the best move I’ve ever seen from Lumet. Highly recommended.

This movie is paired with Physical Evidence on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific.

Cocktail Hour (1933)

Cocktail Hour is a 1933 Columbia pre-code romance with a touch of crime. It was directed by Victor Schertzinger.

Cynthia Warren (Bebe Daniels) is a successful illustrator who is sure that a woman does not need marriage, she just needs freedom. Men are just amusements.

Prince Philippe de Longville (Barry Norton) follows her around like a lovesick puppy dog. He wants to marry her. He’s a nice boy but he’s just a boy. Cynthia is only interested in men so even if she did not want to get married she wouldn’t marry Philippe.

Randy (Randolph Scott) is a different matter. He’s a man. She’s really attracted to him, but won’t marry him.

Randy knows about women. He pretends that he doesn’t care. That drives her crazy. Even if she doesn’t want to marry him how dare he stop pursuing her!

Cynthia heads off to Europe. On the ship she befriends tempestuous Russian pianist Olga Raimoff (Muriel Kirkland). Olga is really just Tessie Burns from Kansas.

And Cynthia has a shipboard romance with the handsome charming William Lawton (Sidney Blackmer). He sweeps Cynthia off her feet. He quotes poetry to her. No girl can resist that.

The affair sours a bit when the ship docks at Southampton and she is introduced to his wife. She heads for Paris. Philippe is there and he’s still mooning over her and he’s insanely jealous of her shipboard over. Randy is there as well, but Cynthia still won’t marry him.

What really bothers Cynthia is that William’s wife Pat (Marjorie Gateson) knows all about Cynthia and doesn’t care. She doesn’t take Cynthia the slightest bit seriously as a threat. There’s nothing more humiliating to a woman than to be not taken seriously as a romantic rival.

William wants to keep Cynthia as his bit on the side. That doesn’t please Cynthia and obviously it’s not to the liking of either Philippe or Randy. It leads to a moment of violence in a hotel room.

Usually I like Bebe Daniels but Cynthia is a character I couldn’t warm to. Too cold and then she switches to self-pity. Randolph Scott is good but doesn’t get enough to do.

I liked Sidney Blackmer’s restrained performance. He doesn’t overdo the charming seducer thing which makes it more plausible that a girl like Cynthia would fall for him.

Several things make this very much a pre-code movie. It’s obvious that the shipboard romance between Cynthia and William went beyond flirtation - had it been mere flirtation her angry reaction when she discovers he’s married would not have made sense.

Pat Lawton is indifferent to her husband’s love affairs of which he has had many, which is certainly very pre-code. Infidelity is not something that shocks any of the characters.

There’s a “battle of the sexes” element to the relationship between Cynthia and Randy and a conflict between traditional ideas on marriage (represented by Randy) and Cynthia’s ambition to be a career woman.

Cocktail Hour is reasonably enjoyable and I love movies set at least partially on board ships. Recommended.

Sony’s Blu-Ray offers no extras but the movie looks extremely good.

Fat City (1972)

John Huston’s career had been in both the commercial and critical doldrums for years when he made Fat City in 1972. It was a surprise commercial hit and critics loved it. It put Huston back on top. Three years later Huston would make the best movie of his career, The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

Fat City is 1970s bleakness at its bleakest. This is nihilism without a trace of hope. The only movie of this period that can match it for bleakness is They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but in that film the characters are driven to despair by economic desperation. It is set at the worst point of the Depression.

But Fat City is set in 1972. The 70s economic crisis was grim but it didn’t start until the Oil Crisis of late 1973. In 1972 the economy was going fine. If you were a loser in 1972 you couldn’t blame the economy. The characters in this movie are all losers and it’s all their own work.

The setting is Stockton, California. Huston and his cinematographer Conrad Hall make it look like an annexe of Hell. Everything is decaying, squalid, depressing and ugly.

Billy Tully (Stacy Keach) is a washed-out prizefighter. He was never much good but now at 30 he’s trying to make a comeback. In a gym he spars with 18-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Billy thinks the kid has promise. He introduces him to his manager, Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto). Ernie is on his way.

But he isn’t really. He’s on his way in the world of third-rate semi-pro boxing. In this world if you win you still lose. Billy never even had a sniff at a title fight. He would always have remained in the sleazy desperate lower echelons of the fight game. He made some money for a while until he got so badly pummelled in a fight that he lost his mojo. If he makes a comeback he’ll be fighting for pitifully small purses in fleapit stadiums until inevitably he’ll get pummelled again and will end as another punch-drunk wreck. He just isn’t smart enough to avoid such a fate.

Ernie has some talent, but not enough. Not enough to get him anywhere near a championship fight. At best he will eke out a living until eventually he gets his brain turned to mush, just like all the other failed fighters. Ernie is also not smart enough to avoid such a fate.

And while Billy looks up to Ruben it’s an illusion. Ruben is the third-rate manager of a string of third-rate boxers. Ruben doesn’t have the training skills or the business acumen to develop anything but third-rate fighters. Ruben is a loser as well.

Billy drifts into a relationship with Oma (Susan Tyrrell), a broken-down self-pitying drunk. She has had three marriages. They all failed. It has never occurred to Oma that this might have been her fault. It has never occurred to Oma that anything has ever been her fault.

When we first see Oma we assume she’s around 40. But Susan Tyrrell was 26 at the time and I suspect Huston deliberately chose a young actress. If you look closely at Oma you can see that she isn’t 40, she’s a young woman who has let herself go to an extraordinary degree. Oma is the last woman in the world that Billy should get mixed up with, and Billy is last man in the world that Oma should become involved with. We know that the relationship will just make things worse for both of them but they’re both incapable of making good decisions.

Meanwhile Ernie has met Faye (Candy Clark). Very soon she has trapped him into marriage by deliberately becoming pregnant. She thinks it’s a clever move but they’re both too young and irresponsible for marriage and Ernie is in no financial position to support a wife and child. We know that the marriage will ruin both their lives, but they’re too dumb to know any better.

For me the weakness of this movie is that I found it difficult to care about people so determined to remain losers. They’re too dumb and too self-pitying to care about. But maybe that’s just me.

The performances are all effective.

There are two major boxing scenes and Huston does some clever misdirection in each of them. In one there’s some obvious foreshadowing but it doesn’t play out quite as he’s led us to believe it will. In the other we’re led to expect a particular result because that’s the way other boxing movies would play it but Huston pulls the rug from under us.

The ending is interesting. I saw it one way, others see it another way.

I didn’t exactly enjoy this movie but if you’re prepared to join Huston in a deep dive into despair and misery you can admire the skill with which he conducts us on that dive. Recommended, assuming you enjoy watching awful things happen to hopeless people.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1981)

Tarzan the Ape Man was released in 1981. This is the notorious Bo Derek Tarzan movie. The one directed by her husband John Derek. Everybody knows this is a really bad movie because everyone says so. And film critics said so, so it must be true.

Personally I don’t care what everybody knows and I certainly don’t care what film critics think so I’m going to approach this one with an open mind.

Bo Derek burst onto the film scene with her role in Blake Edwards’ 10. It was bit part but she got all the attention. Right from the start critics were out to get her.

This was an attempt to do a slightly different sort of Tarzan movie. Tarzan enters the picture quite late.

In 1910 Jane Parker (Bo Derek) arrives in Africa to be reunited with her father. She has never met him. She knows him only by reputation. He is the legendary explorer James Parker (Richard Harris).

Jane insists on joining him on his latest expedition. He is hoping to discover the fabled Inland Sea, and perhaps there are other things he hopes to find.

Also accompanying him will be big game hunter and photographer Harry Holt (John Phillip Law).

While they’re camped deep in the jungle blood-curdling cries are heard in the night. It is the legendary Tarzan. No-one knows who or what Tarzan is. Some say he is a gigantic white ape. Some say he is a gigantic white man. Everyone fears him.

Jane is rather surprised when she meets Tarzan. He rescues her from a lion. She realises that he is only a man. She also notices that he is quite a man.

Having caught sight of Tarzan at last James Parker is convinced that this jungle man is appallingly dangerous.

Tarzan carries her off. This is what James Parker feared would happen. He has no doubt that Tarzan intends to make Jane his mate. James is determined not to let that happen.

There’s a weird kind of courtship taking place between Jane an Tarzan but other sinister things are afoot. A hostile tribe is tracking the expedition. It’s at this point that the movie becomes interestingly weird and slightly surreal and perhaps just a bit kinky.

As I watched this film I was trying to see what it was about Bo Derek’s performance that earned her so much critical derision. But I couldn’t see it. I think her performance is fine. There’s one moment, where Jane is watching Tarzan and it’s clear that she is, for the first time in her life, feeling the stirrings of sexual lust. Miss Derek really nails it. She gets the point across subtly and without being crass, and in a rather sweet good-natured way.

I was also trying to spot exactly what it was about about the job John Derek does as director here that made him the target of critical venom. Again I couldn’t see it. He does a perfectly fine job.

Richard Harris goes way over the top but you don’t hire Richard Harris if you want a low-key performance. This movie is very much a story of obsession. James Parker is an obsessed inspired madman. Which really was true of most of the real-life explorers of that age. Harris plays him as a larger-than-life character, which is as it should be.

There’s also a lot of emphasis on the father-daughter relationship. Initially she hates him. Gradually she falls under his spell. She starts to like the idea of having a remarkable man as a father.

And of course there’s the love story, which is handled nicely. Jane and Tarzan are like two nervous teenagers, strongly physically attracted to each other but too innocent to know what to do about it.

Some of the action scenes are edited in very odd ways. It is quite a weird movie at times but that aspect, along with the slight hints of perversity, make it in some ways quite close to the spirit of pre-WW2 pulp adventure fiction.

And course Miss Derek takes her clothes off.

This is a slightly oddball movie but I rather liked it, and I liked Bo Derek. I’m going to highly recommend it because that’s the crazy sort of guy I am.

And yes I agree that Tarzan and His Mate (1934) is still the best Tarzan movie.

Back to the Wall (1958)

Back to the Wall (Le dos au mur) is one of three 1950s French crime movies included in Kino Lorber’s recent French Noir Blu-Ray boxed set. It’s based on the novel Délivrez-nous du mal by Frédéric Dard.

It lays out its noir credentials right at the start. The opening scene is not just a night scene, but it’s that film noir kind of night. You know, those nights when you know that bad stuff is going to happen.

Then we see a sinister guy in a trench-coat and he’s clearly up to no good.

We’re not surprised that there’s a murder. At least we assume it’s a murder although we don’t see exactly what happened.

We then get some grisly scenes of the body being disposed of.

It then gets even more noir, with a flashback and voiceover narration.

There’s an adulterous wife, Gloria Decrey, played by Jeanne Moreau during the film noir icon phase of her career. The cuckolded husband knows about her betrayal but his reaction is not quite what we expect. He intends to do something about it but his plan is convoluted and indirect.

There’s a blackmail angle. There’s a sleazy private detective and he’s surprised that what he’s being asked to do is not quite what he anticipated.

It becomes a war of nerves.

What a director doesn’t tell you is just as important as what he does tell you, and being told things can be just as misleading as not being told if the director knows what he’s doing. You’re going to suspect from the start that there may be a bit of misdirection going on but suspecting such a thing does not necessarily help. This movie keeps leading up to obvious plot twists and then the plot twist turns out not to be the one we expected.

We understand part of the motivations of one of the key characters but we don’t know what that person’s actual intentions are.

And there’s plenty of suspicion, guilt and emotional ambiguity.

I don’t know anything about director Édouard Molinaro but he does a confident assured job here, leading us up the garden path with considerable skill. He has a clever literate script from which to work which always helps.

I know almost nothing about Gérard Oury, whose acting career apparently petered out by the early 1960s, but he’s very good here. It’s a very noir performance as a man in control on the surface but in turmoil underneath.

This movie was in the same year that Elevator to the Gallows AKA Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud) made Jeanne Moreau a huge star. She’s excellent here. Gloria is not exactly a femme fatale, or at least not in a straightforward way, but she has the same kind of disastrous effect on men.

This is a nicely shot and very atmospheric movie.

Back to the Wall is genuine film noir as well as being a clever mystery suspense thriller, and it’s very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers the movie in French with English subtitles. The transfer is extremely good (the movie was shot in black-and-white) and thankfully there are no extras.

I’ve also reviewed Speaking of Murder (1957) from this set. It’s not quite as good but it’s well worth a watch.

High Road to China (1983)

The problem with High Road to China is that it inevitably gets pigeon-holed as a Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off and slammed for not being as good as Spielberg’s movie.

It also seems to have had a rather troubled production history with both John Huston and Sidney J. Furie being lined up to direct. In the end Brian G. Hutton directed. It was a co-production with one of the partners being legendary Hong Kong studio Golden Harvest.

Tom Selleck famously had to turn down the lead role in Raiders of the Lost Ark after having signed the contract to do Magnum, P.I. for television. That of course is another reason for the endless comparisons between the two films.

What Raiders of the Lost Ark actually did was to establish that there was still a huge market for old-fashioned adventure movies and thereby made movies such as Romancing the Stone (1984) and King Solomon’s Mines (1985) possible. Which in my book was a good thing. I love those movies.

High Road to China is set in the 1920s. O’Malley (Tom Selleck) is a broken-down former fighter ace. When the war ended he crawled inside a bottle. He’s been there ever since. He also consoles himself with women. This tends to get him into trouble with the husbands of those women.

And now Eve Tozer (Bess Armstrong) enters his life. She needs to find her father. He’s been missing for several years. His slimy business partner Bentik (Robert Morley)

is trying to have him declared legally dead. Bentik will then own the business and Eve will be left with nothing. Eve has to find dear old dad pronto. She will need a plane. O’Malley has two planes. She offers him a lot of money to help her find her father. O’Malley is indignant. He tells her he can’t be bought. She doubles the offer and he decides he can be bought after all.

O’Malley doesn’t know that Bentik has hired people to kill Eve. It’s one of several important things she forgot to tell him.

They get captured by a crazed Wazieri chieftain (Brian Blessed in glorious full-blown Brian Blessed Mode). The trail later leads to Nepal, and to China. With lots of action along the way.

Now maybe this movie is a bit formulaic but that’s the point. It’s trying to be an old-fashioned rollicking adventure tale and it has to include the elements people expect in such a story.

There are lots of narrow escape from certain disaster. There are aerial dogfights. There are larger-than-life villains. There’s the beautiful slave girl who might be able to help them. O’Malley has the standard likeable loyal sidekick, Struts (Jack Weston).

There’s the broken-down embittered hero who might still be a hero if he can stay sober long enough. Tom Selleck is perfect - alternating between being charming, pathetic, amusing, suspicious, brave and really really annoyed.

And there’s the Feisty Heroine, in this case belonging to the Spoilt Rich Girl sub-group. When we first see Eve she is wearing the full-blown flapper gear, a look that I happen to love. Not every woman can get away with wearing the dress she’s wearing but Bess Armstrong pulls it off perfectly. Bess Armstrong is as cute as a button and she’s lively and fun.

Of course the embittered hero and the feisty heroine hate each other until they finally figure out that they’re madly in love.

So there’s nothing dazzlingly original but the movie is fast-moving, there’s great location shooting, there are flying sequences, shoot-outs and explosions. The action sequences are nicely done. The two leads have fine chemistry.

Most critics seem to have approached this movie with the assumption that it was going to be a second-rate Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off and so they’d already decided they didn’t like it before they actually watched it. If you just approach it as a lightweight romantic adventure movie you might enjoy it quite a bit, as I did. Highly recommended.

The Hen’s Teeth Video Blu-Ray is basically barebones but it’s a good transfer.

If this is the sort of thing you enjoy I can’t recommend the 1985 King Solomon’s Mines too highly. It’s a blast.

No Mercy (1986)

No Mercy is a 1986 thriller which pairs Richard Gere and Kim Basinger. It could perhaps at a stretch be considered to have a slight neo-noir tinge and also perhaps an erotic thriller vibe although to be honest that’s a lot of a stretch.

As an indirect result of a bungled drugs stakeout Chicago cop Eddie Jillette and his partner Joe Collins stumble upon something much bigger - a planned hit. Eddie and Joe, perhaps unwisely, arrange a meet with a mysterious New Orleans businessman (we will find out that his name is Paul Deveneux) who wants a rival rubbed out. Eddie poses as a hitman. Perhaps Eddie and Joe should have realised the meet might not go smoothly. The guy who wants to hire a hitman doesn’t seem the type. He’s more of an old southern aristocracy type.

This guy has a girl with him. Her name is Michelle (Kim Basinger). She’s the reason for the hit. So it’s not business but a personal grudge, which could get messy.

It does get messy. Eddie’s partner gets disembowelled. He’s not the only one who gets killed. Eddie is off to New Orleans, ostensibly to bring his partner’s killer to justice but in fact his objective is revenge pure and simple.

The problem is that Eddie doesn’t know the identity of the target of the aborted hit. All he knows is that the target was a powerful ruthless man, and that he is Michelle’s owner.

Eddie is going to have to track down Michelle. He finds her, and he finds the man who owns her, Losado (Jeroen Krabbé). He also finds out that everything that he assumed he knew about the case is wrong, and everything that he assumed he knew about Michelle is wrong as well.

Another unpleasant discovery is that the New Orleans cops do not want him in their city. Or rather Deveneux’s brother doesn’t want him in New Orleans. Deveneux is extremely rich. If he’s upset, the New Orleans PD is upset.

Eddie ends up in the middle of a bayou, handcuffed to Michelle. They’re lucky to be alive. Losado doesn’t just employ a couple of goons to enforce his will, he has a veritable private army.

Eddie is just one cop on his own in a strange city but by now he’s seriously annoyed. You don’t want to get Eddie Jillette seriously annoyed. And as far as Eddie is concerned if his mission is to be a kamikaze mission, so be it.

He still has to figure out what to do with this strange girl. And Michelle is a very strange girl. Eddie is not just in a strange city. He’s stumbled into a totally foreign world. This is the world of the old French Louisiana. It’s the 1980s in Chicago but here time has stood still for a couple of centuries. And Michelle is like a girl from another planet.

Looking at online reviews I’m surprised that so many people dislike this movie. There’s no shortage of adrenalin-rush action and mayhem with some terrific action set-pieces. There’s good suspense. There’s a weird twisted love story. There’s an exotic setting. As far as thrillers go this one ticks most of my boxes.

I’m also surprised so many people dislike Richard Gere. His performance is very much in that intense edgy wired mode that was so popular at the time but for my money Gere does this sort of thing with more class than most actors of this type. He doesn’t have to shout and wave his arms about and jump up and down to get the message across that he’s a man on the edge. I like him a lot in this movie.

As for Kim Basinger, she has a tricky role. She’s playing a woman who just doesn’t see the world the way women of the 80s see it. She’s like a woman living in two different eras at the same time. I think Basinger is very good indeed in this part.

There’s nothing subtle about Jeroen Krabbé’s performance as Losado but he radiates pure evil and that’s what the part calls for.

The one weakness is that although the acting chemistry between Gere and Basinger is excellent this is a movie that needed a lot more erotic heat.

Richard Pearce is not a particularly big name as a director but he handles matters here with assurance.

No Mercy hits the ground running and maintains the momentum. Whether it’s a neo-noir or an erotic thriller or a plain old action thriller doesn’t matter - whatever it is it delivers the goods. Highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray presentation looks great.