The House of the Seven Hawks (1959)

The House of the Seven Hawks is a 1959 British thriller directed by Richard Thorpe.

Robert Taylor is John Nordley, an American who operates a charter boat service in a small British port. His latest job involves a brief cruise in English coastal waters. His passenger is a Dutchman named Anselm. Anselm wants Nordley to take him to the Netherlands. That could cause problems with the British authorities. Nordley had not informed them that he would be heading to a foreign port. But Anselm is paying well.

It’s established from the start that Nordley is a nice guy but perhaps not scrupulously honest. He’s not quite a crook but he can be persuaded to bend the rules and perhaps venture just a little bit outside the strict letter of the law.

He makes it to a Dutch port but by this time his passenger is deceased. Nordley assumes the man had a heart attack.

He’s puzzled when the man’s daughter appears in a small power boat and invites herself aboard his yacht just before he reaches that Dutch port. He’s even more mystified that she seems to be looking for something and having failed to find it she departs very suddenly.

Nordley has already found something curious, a letter with a diagram, among Anselm’s effects.

The Dutch police have astonishing news for Nordley. His passenger was not a man named Anselm. He was a high-ranking Dutch police officer, Inspector Sluiter, engaged in a mysterious investigation in England.

Both Nordley and the Dutch police are puzzled by Sluiter’s actions. Was Sluiter involved in something shady?

Nordley has another surprise in story for him. That girl who came to meet his yacht is no relative to the dead man. She is Elsa (Linda Christian). And now another woman has shown up who really is Inspector Sluiter’s daughter, Constanta (Nicole Maurey). Nordley is not sure that he trusts either woman. They’re not sure that they can trust him.

The mysterious Captain Rohner (Eric Pohlmann) is interested in that letter as well. Nordley has no doubt that Captain Rohner cannot be trusted at all but he is open to the idea of a deal, if the terms are favourable.

That letter is a key, in a metaphorical sense. A key to something interesting, fascinating and valuable. Probably not legal, but nobody involved in this tale is overly concerned with legalities.

Robert Taylor is ideally cast. He did the world-weary slightly morally corrupted thing so very well in so many movies at this period and he does it extremely well here.

Eric Pohlmann is always an absolute joy to watch and he’s in fine form here. Nicole Maurey and Linda Christian are good. Philo Hauser is fun as Nordley’s useful but very disreputable and thoroughly untrustworthy friend Charlie Ponz.

The plot is nicely worked out. There’s not much action (although there is some). Mostly the movie relies on an atmosphere of double-dealing and general moral murkiness.

This is a low-key but fine entertaining thriller and I do enjoy nautical thrillers so it’s highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD offers a very satisfactory transfer.

This movie was based on the 1952 novel The House of the Seven Flies by Victor Canning, a now forgotten but very fine British thriller writer.

The Garden Murder Case (1936)

The Garden Murder Case was the tenth Philo Vance movie. It was released by MGM in 1936.

S.S. Van Dine did not sell the rights to all the Philo Vance novels to the same studio which partly explains why Vance was played by no less than ten different actors! The one actor who really nailed the part was of course William Powell. Most of the other actors’ interpretations of the role were either less than entirely satisfactory or simply awful.

In The Garden Murder Case we get Edmund Lowe as Vance.

A day at the races ends in tragedy. A jockey is killed. The circumstances are ambiguous. In fact the circumstances are downright odd. It may have been a curiously unconventional suicide.

There will shortly be another puzzling death.

Ruthless businessman and racehorse owner Edgar Hammle (Gene Lockhart) might be a suspect.

More deaths follow and again they’re ambiguous - they could be accidents, they could be suicides, they could be murders.

Ace amateur sleuth Philo Vance has his own ideas but he’s missing a very important clue. It’s the key to the case.

The story is complicated but it includes lots of cool plot devices that were fashionable at the time and are now very unfashionable. But they’re the kinds of plot devices that make the detective stories of the interwar period so much fun.

In my opinion most online reviews reveal too much of the plot of this movie. There are things you can guess early on but I think it’s better to be not quite sure if your guesses are accurate.

This is a very old-fashioned detective story and that’s why it’s so enjoyable. There’s no trace of gritty realism here.

There is of course a dangerous dame, in the person of Hammle’s niece Zalia (Virginia Bruce).

Edmund Lowe does at least give us a rather likeable Philo Vance. He is not one of the great screen Philo Vances but he’s not too bad. The main problem is that Vance needs to be a bit more larger-than-life and a lot more flamboyant. Not everyone likes Vance as a character but if you tone him down then he’s not Philo Vance any more.

The other cast members are very solid and I liked Virginia Bruce a great deal.

Edward L. Marin was a solid journeyman director who made several rather good movies, including the superb Nocturne (1946) and Johnny Angel (1945), both with George Raft. He does a very competent job with The Garden Murder Case. It’s not exactly a visually dazzling film but it moves along at a decent pace.

Bertram Millhauser wrote the script.

In 1936 Hollywood was convinced that mysteries and thrillers needed to have comic relief. The comic relief was usually awful. In this case Nat Pendleton is exceptionally irritating as Sergeant (in the novels Heath is no genius detective but he is not a clown).

The Garden Murder Case is not a great Philo Vance movie but it’s reasonably entertaining. Worth a look.

This movie is included in the Warner Archive Philo Vance Murder Case Collection DVD set. The movies in this set, which vary a great deal in quality, also include The Casino Murder Case (1935), The Kennel Murder Case (1933), The Bishop Murder Case (1929) and The Dragon Murder Case (1934). The Garden Murder Case gets an acceptable transfer. This is a boxed set that is definitely worth picking up.

The Wet Parade (1932)

The Wet Parade is a 1932 MGM melodrama directed by Victor Fleming and based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, a once renowned writer now almost entirely forgotten.

The movie is essentially an extended sermon on the evils of the demon drink. The wretched script was written by John Lee Mahin.

There are two parallel plots which gradually converge. One begins in the South, the other in the North. The time is 1916, with much excitement about the upcoming election with Democrat incumbent Woodrow Wilson expected to win due to his solemn promise to keep America out of the war.

Faded southern gentleman Roger Chilcote (Lewis Stone) is determinedly drinking himself to death. His daughter Maggie May (Dorothy Jordan) disapproves of drinking. His son Roger Chilcote, Jr (Neil Hamilton) is a feckless would-be writer who enjoys partying more than writing.

Up north sleazy political operative Pow Tarleton (Walter Huston) is also a drunkard. His son Kip Tarleton (Robert Young) is, like Maggie May, a puritan.

Wilson is re-elected and immediately breaks his election promises.

And Prohibition is brought in. Kip and Maggie May are delighted. They’re keen moral crusaders.

Both Pow Tarleton and Roger Chilcote, Jr are brought to the brink of destruction by the booze. This inspires Kip to join the Prohibition Bureau and become an undercover law enforcement officer for them.

The plot is rambling and disconnected and never really develops a strong narrative momentum. At 118 minutes this movie is about 40 minutes too long.

I’m not sure what the novel was like but the movie is trying to deliver two messages simultaneously - that alcohol is totally evil and that Prohibition just made things worse. It is possible to believe both those things but the movie never quite reconciles the two arguments. It also delivers both messages in an incredibly heavy-handed way.

The ending is what you expect from such a muddled mess of a movie.

The dialogue is clunky, feels phoney and often gives way to speechifying.

The acting is mostly terrible. Even Walter Huston is hard to take. The one bright spot is Myrna Loy as Roger Jr’s deliciously wicked actress girlfriend. Myrna Loy was such a wonderful bad girl in the pre-code era but she doesn’t get enough screen time to save this clunker.

And just when you think things cannot get any worse along comes Jimmy Durante as a prohibition enforcement agent. By this time you’ll probably be really feeling like a drink, even if it is bathtub gin.

The one thing that is truly pre-code about this movie is the assumption that every level of government is riddled with corruption. You wouldn’t get away with that once the Production Code came in.

The idea of a movie about a social problem in which the cure ends up being much worse than the disease is fine. It’s just handled in a very clumsy fashion and the movie is a chaotic mess. This is a truly awful movie. Avoid.

This movie is included in the Warner Archive Forbidden Hollywood Volume 6 DVD boxed set. The transfer is OK.

Dead Calm (1989)

Dead Calm is a 1989 Australian suspense thriller directed by Phillip Noyce, based on a novel by Charles Williams.

It’s a nautical thriller. John Ingram (Sam Neill) is an Australian naval officer whose son was killed in a car accident. His wife Rae (Nicole Kidman) survived the accident. The accident was not her fault. They both need time to recover. A cruise on John’s yacht seems like the perfect answer.

They spot a black schooner. A guy in a dinghy rows across from the schooner. He is Hughie Warriner (Billy Zane). He claims to be the sole survivor of a bizarre tragedy. The other five people on board the schooner died of food poisoning. Hughie claims the schooner is slowly sinking.

John is no fool. He’s spent twenty-five years at sea. He isn’t the slightest bit convinced by Hughie’s story. He locks Hughie into a cabin and rows across to the schooner to investigate. It becomes apparent that very bad very strange things went on aboard that schooner. Meanwhile Hughie has escaped and he’s hijacked John’s yacht, with Rae aboard.

John is stranded on the schooner. There is no wind and the engine doesn’t work. Rae is stuck on the yacht with a guy who could be merely a bit unbalanced but could be a total psycho. The latter seems more and more likely. Either way he’s extremely dangerous.

There are now essentially two stories going on. John, on board the schooner, tries to unravel what really happened on that unlucky vessel. It seems to have been some sort of sex cruise, with some very dangerous games being played.

Rae, on the yacht, has to find some way to subdue or trick Hughie so that she can stay alive and rescue her husband. This is becoming rather urgent. The schooner is slowly sinking.

Hughie’s intentions are frightening because they’re unknown. He might be a killer, he might have been a victim. He may be sexually obsessed with Rae. Or, more worrying, he may have created some weird romantic fantasy in his head, a fantasy in which he and Rae sail the South Pacific together. He may intend to kill Rae. He may intend to rape her.

It’s Rae’s story that becomes the main focus. That puts a lot of pressure on Nicole Kidman who was at that time a young relatively inexperienced actress and unknown outside Australia. She is more than equal to the challenge. This is the movie that demonstrated that Kidman could easily carry a film as a lead actress. And Rae is an interesting character. She’s no action heroine, just a resourceful woman fighting for survival. And she’s fighting to save her man. That will make her fight very hard indeed. Kidman makes Rae likeable and convincing. Rae could make things easier for herself by simply killing Hughie but, quite realistically, she is very reluctant to take that step. She’s an ordinary woman. Killing does not come naturally or easily to her.

Rae has one thing going for her. She’s a Navy wife. She knows boats and she knows the sea.

While Kidman is the standout performer both Sam Neill and Billy Zane are excellent.

These three people are the only significant characters in the movie, in fact for most of the running time they’re the only characters. The three leads had to be good and they had to work well together. They’re all equal to the job.

The cinematography is gorgeous. The location shooting was done on the Great Barrier Reef and the natural beauty nicely counterpoints the unnatural horrors.

The only character developed in any detail is Rae. Having lost her only child she comes to the realisation that her husband is all she’s got, but she loves him so that’s enough. She will do whatever it takes to save him. Nicole Kidman never goes over-the-top but she does a fine job letting us know what makes Rae tick.

We don’t know exactly what makes Hughie tick but that’s a plus rather than a minus. It makes him more frightening. It also means that Rae cannot reason with him.

Dead Calm doesn’t try to do anything too fancy. It’s a suspense thriller and it doesn’t get bogged down with extraneous details to any great extent. It just happens to be an extremely well-executed suspense thriller. It’s obviously a must-see if you’re a Nicole Kidman fan. Highly recommended.

The DVD release is barebones but the transfer is very good. There’s been a Blu-Ray release as well.

Philip Noyce went on to direct the criminally underrated erotic thriller Sliver (1993).

The Indian Tomb (1921)

Joe May’s 1921 silent epic The Indian Tomb was based on Thea von Harbou's very successful 1918 novel The Indian Tomb. Thea von Harbou was of course married to Fritz Lang. Lang and von Harbou wrote the screenplay for the film.

The novel, although extremely good, contains one very serious flaw. Interestingly enough that flaw is corrected in the movie. I don’t know whether it was von Harbou or Lang or May who made the change but it was very much a change for the better.

The movie is in two parts, Part I: The Mission of the Yogi (Die Sendung des Yoghi) and Part II: The Tiger of Bengal (Der Tiger von Eschnapur). It is in fact a single story with no obvious break between the two parts and the only reason it was originally released that way was the 3 hours and 40 minutes running time.

The story begins with a prologue. A yogi buried alive is resuscitated by the fabulously rich Ayan III, the Prince of Bengal (Conrad Veidt). According to legend when this happens the yogi must grant the person who revives him one wish. The prologue is important because it establishes that the yogi, Ramigani (Bernhard Goetzke), has supernatural or at least paranormal powers. And it establishes that Ramigani is compelled to carry out out the Prince’s commands even when he disagrees with them.

The Prince instructs Ramigami to persuade famed architect Herbert Rowland (Olaf Fønss) to travel to India to build a tomb for him. Herbert understands that the tomb will house the body of a princess, the beloved of the Prince. Herbert is persuaded that he must leave for India immediately without informing his fiancée Irene Amundsen (Mia May). Herbert departs on the Prince’s steam yacht. Irene is however a resourceful woman and she sets off for India as well.

On arrival in India Herbert discovers that there are very important things he hadn’t been told. The tomb is not to house the body of the Princess. It is to house the memory of a Great Love. A love betrayed. The Princess is alive. She has betrayed the Prince with a dashing but unscrupulous British officer and hunter, MacAllan.

The Prince has plans for revenge but his plans are not straightforward.

Herbert suffers several misfortunes, the most serious being that he is infected with leprosy. Nothing can save him. Or perhaps something can. But the price will be terrible.

MacAllan is a hunted man.

Irene is more or less a prisoner. The Prince’s feelings towards her are ambiguous. It’s possible that he desires her but his feelings about women are more than a little distorted.

Herbert and Irene become involved in attempts to rescue the Princess.

There is plenty of action and adventure. Narrow brushes with hungry tigers! Crocodile-infested rivers. A desperate escape across a rickety rope bridge over a chasm. A shootout at MacAllan’s bungalow. All filmed with style and energy.

This is however mostly a story about love. It’s a story of love betrayed, of misguided misplaced love, obsessive love, unhealthy love. But also noble love and faithful love.

Conrad Veidt is perfectly cast. He could play heroes or villains or victims or mysterious ambiguous characters and the Prince is all those things. He is probably mad, but he was probably once a very good man. Veidt also had tremendous magnetism. He’s in top form here.

The whole cast is good.

There’s plenty of interesting ambiguity. The Prince is not a mere villain. He is a man so shattered by emotional betrayal that he is no longer quite sane. The Princess is no innocent victim. She did betray the Prince’s love. And MacAllan is no hero. He not only seduced the Princess but boasted about it afterwards. Hebert Rowland is perhaps a little ambiguous as well, a man who allowed his artistic ambition to override his judgment. The yogi seems sinister at first but then we start to wonder.

This is a breathtakingly lavish production. The sets are jaw-dropping.

The movie might be better remembered had Lang directed it himself but I can’t fault May’s direction. This is a stunning emotionally complex movie and it’s very highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Thea von Harbou's novel The Indian Tomb and also Lang’s own 1959 version, Fritz Lang's The Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959).

I’ve also reviewed another worthwhile Joe May movie, Asphalt (1929).

Shampoo (1975)

Shampoo is a 1975 sex comedy which was something of a personal project for Warren Beatty. He came up with the idea, he co-wrote the script with Robert Towne and he produced. It was a huge box-office hit. It’s intriguingly untypical of 1970s Hollywood movies, with definite hints of a European sensibility.

Right from the start the pacing is frenetic and the plotting is chaotic. But that’s intentional. It reflects the complete chaos of the life of the protagonist, George (Warren Beatty).

George is a very fashionable Beverly Hills hairdresser. Despite being a hairdresser he is very interested in women. Maybe too interested for his own good.

His ambition is to have his own beauty salon. He’s an excellent hairdresser and would have no difficulty attracting clients. Every rich fashionable woman in L.A. wants her hair done by George. The problem is that George is thirty-five going on sixteen. There’s no way he is responsible enough to have his own business. But self-awareness is not George’s strong suit.

His biggest problem is juggling all his women. He is currently sleeping with quite a few women. In fact lots of women.

He has a cute girlfriend Jill (Goldie Hawn). He’s also sleeping with a rich client, Felicia (Lee Grant). Felicia thinks she can persuade her rich tycoon husband Lester (Jack Warden) to advance George the money to open his own beauty shop. Fortunately Lester doesn’t know that George is sleeping with his wife.

Lester has a glamorous mistress, Jackie (Julie Christie. Fortunately Lester doesn’t know that Jackie is George’s ex-girlfriend. It’s even more fortunate that Lester doesn’t know that George is still sleeping with Jackie. It’s also probably lucky that Lester doesn’t know that George is sleeping with his daughter Lorna (Carrie Fisher). Felicia knows, and it seems to excite her.

George is so self-absorbed that he has no idea that he is self-absorbed. He knows his life is over-complicated but it’s never occurred to him that this may be his own fault. He is good-looking but he is so charmless and selfish that you wonder why women are attracted to him. Perhaps it’s the bad boy thing. Or the irresponsible naughty boy thing. Or they think they can change him.

This is the world of the rich and vacuous in L.A., decadent shallow people living shallow meaningless lives with enough money to shelter them from reality.

The movie begins on November 4, 1968, the day before the election that swept Nixon into office. There is presumably some political satire intended but what’s interesting is that it’s the achingly liberal wealthy middle-class elites who are being satirised. This is a Hollywood movie savaging the middle class rather than the working class or rural Americans who were usually Hollywood’s favoured targets.

But this is not really a political movie. It’s a social and sexual satire, and a social and sexual melodrama. It’s an intelligent sophisticated sex comedy. And as social and sexual satire it has real bite.

What Shampoo really takes aim at is deception. It’s not the sexual promiscuity of the various characters that does the damage, it’s the lies they tell.

Jack Warden pretty much steals the picture but Warren Beatty is very impressive. George is not an admirable person but Beatty brings him to life. We may still not like George but we start to see what makes him tick. Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn are excellent.

At the time Shampoo got an X rating. There’s some mild nudity and some mildly graphic simulated sex but mostly it got the X rating because it’s a very grown-up movie. It deals with grown-up subject matter in a grown-up way.

Even though it’s a product of mainstream Hollywood this movie has more of an affinity with sophisticated European sex comedies such as Pasquale Festa Campanile’s The Libertine (1968) than with the general run of mainstream Hollywood movies. Shampoo was a very unusual Hollywood movie at the time and it’s still unusual. It takes sexual relationships seriously and it dissects them mercilessly. But with sensitivity. These are people with chaotic personal lives. They play emotional and sexual games and they forget that people, both men and women, can get hurt.

Shampoo is also very funny.

The Criterion Blu-Ray looks good and includes a very good interview with Warren Beatty.

Casino Royale (1954 teleplay)

There have been several attempts to bring Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, to the screen. The 1967 attempt was of course one of the most epic trainwrecks in movie history. The first attempt however was an American television production which went to air in October 1954. It was an episode of the Climax anthology series.

It has huge huge problems but these were not necessarily entirely the fault of the people who made this teleplay.

This was live television. All we have is a crude kinescope recording. Being live means it’s very studio-bound. Live television dramas were shot entirely on two or three sets. And the sets had to be simple. There was no way to do live TV any other way. Very early television, from the late 40s and early 50s, is extraordinarily clunky and stodgy mostly due to the extreme limitations of the technology. If you want an example, try watching Racket Squad (1951-53). If you can endure it.

But progress was rapid. Within a year or two of this teleplay’s broadcast TV was becoming much more assured and much more polished. Series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents (which premiered in 1955), Maverick (premiered 1957) and M Squad (premiered 1957) represent a staggering quantum leap from series like Climax.

There was no way to do exciting action scenes on live TV so the action in Casino Royale is very limp.

The other thing to consider is that in 1954 Ian Fleming and James Bond were totally unknown in the United States. Only one Bond novel had been published in the US at that stage and sales were miserable. Even in Britain Bond was still far from being a pop culture icon. In the US nobody had heard of James Bond. So it’s not surprising that in this adaptation he’s an American named Jimmy Bond (played by an American actor) and he’s a totally conventional American screen tough guy.

There is almost no mention at all of espionage. The villain, Le Chiffre, could just as easily have been a regular gangster. Bond could have been an FBI agent.

This is Casino Royale done as third-rate stock-standard hardboiled crime. It just doesn’t feel like a real spy thriller.

The glamorous deadly and sexy Vesper Lynd from the novel is nowhere to be seen. She is replaced by a dull colourless good girl heroine, Valerie Mathis (Linda Christian). Casino Royale without Vesper Lynd is like Double Indemnity without Phyllis Dietrichsen.

All that’s left from the novel is the confrontation between Bond and Le Chiffre at the gaming tables, and a very sanitised version of the scene in which Bond is tortured by Le Chiffre.

The gambling scene is done reasonably well. It’s the kind of scene that could be made to work on live television. Having Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre certainly helps.

Bond’s CIA contact Felix Leiter becomes a British agent, Clarence Leiter (played by Australian Michael Pate).

It’s hard to judge the acting because you always have to remember that this is all done within the constraints of live TV. And in 1954 actors were vaguely aware that TV acting was not like either stage or film acting but they hadn’t yet quite figured out the right approach. It’s amazing to see such entertaining actors as Peter Lorre and Michael Pate coming across as slightly stodgy.

Barry Nelson as Bond is terrible. You have to make allowance for the fact that he’s not actually playing Bond as Bond, he’s playing Bond as a generic American tough guy cop type. But he’s still very dull.

Anything recorded on kinescope (the predecessor to videotape) is going to look rough and this teleplay does indeed look rough. It was apparently thought to be lost fir many years until a copy turned up in the 80s.

Unless you’re a Peter Lorre completist or a Bond completist there’s no particular reason to watch this one. It doesn’t feel even remotely like a Bond thriller.

Ladyhawke (1985)

Ladyhawke is a 1985 fantasy film and it really is a bit of an oddity. I think it’s a wonderful movie but I can see why it flopped at the box office. It’s totally out of step with other movies of that genre of that era. It’s also to some extent out of step with the mainstream filmmaking approaches of the 80s.

It was produced and directed by Richard Donner.

The setting is northern Italy. The time period is not specified precisely but references to the exploits of the hero’s grandfather during the Crusades might suggest the 13th or 14th centuries.

A young thief, Phillipe Gaston (Matthew Broderick), escapes from an escape-proof dungeon.

Local authority is vested in the Bishop of Aquila (played by John Wood) and the bishop wants Phillipe recaptured. He sees the young thief’s escape as a challenge to his prestige and authority. The bishop is something of a tyrant and seems to rule mostly by fear.

Phillipe encounters Etienne of Navarre (Rutger Hauer). Navarre is a rather brooding figure, obviously a man in the grip of some obsession, but in his own way he seems to be a decent man who can even be almost kindly at times. Navarre has a hawk, an impressive bird of which he is inordinately proud. There is clearly a bond between the man and the hawk.

But at nightfall Navarre disappears completely and a beautiful lady appears. She is Isabeau of Anjou (Michelle Pfeiffer). She has an animal companion as well, a wolf. There is clearly a bond between the woman and the wolf.

In fact Navarre and Isabeau are the victims of an awful curse. They were lovers, until they aroused the ire of the bishop who called on the powers of darkness to afflict with a cruel and ingenious curse. During the day Isabeau is transformed into the hawk. At night Navarre is transformed into the wolf. They can never be together in human form. They are in fact doomed to be forever together and forever apart.

A nice touch is that in their animal forms they have no knowledge of their human natures. All the wolf knows is that for some reason he must protect this woman. All the hawk knows is that somehow she belongs to this man. They can never communicate. They can only communicate very indirectly, through Phillipe.

Another very nice touch is that Phillipe is a likeable pleasant resourceful young man but he is a chronic liar. That turns out to be useful. Whenever Isabeau asks if Navarre has spoken of her Phillipe assures her that Navarre speaks constantly of the strength of his love for her. That isn’t true. Navarre is a man of few words who could never articulate his feelings in this way. Phillipe tells Isabeau lies, but they are true lies. They are the things that are in Navarre’s heart. When Navarre asks if Isabeau has spoken of him Phillipe tells him the same sorts of true lies. There are things Isabeau cannot bring herself to say but Phillipe has survived as long as he has by being extremely astute. He knows how Isabeau feels about Navarre.

When the hawk is wounded crazy old monk Imperius (Leo McKern) enters the picture. He knows something very very important, but he doesn’t know how to make Navarre and Isabeau believe it.

By the mid-80s the established formula for adventure or fantasy movies was non-stop action, spectacle, some humour and a dash of romance. When the sword-and-sorcery genre emerged the formula remained the same but with a slightly tongue-in-cheek edge.

Ladyhawke ignores this formula completely. The focus is entirely on the love story. There’s some action and some excitement but it’s handled in a low-key way and there are no spectacular action set-pieces. This is a movie that relies on mood rather than spectacle. It’s a beautiful movie but it’s beautiful in a subtle slightly dreamy way.

This is a movie that seems to be aiming for the tone of 19th century medievalism - the romantic harkening back to the days of chivalry of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and of Pre-Raphaelite painting. I think it does this very successfully.

The casting is perfect. Rutger Hauer was a guy who could wear medieval garb and make you think that he’d been dressing that way all his life. He plays Navarre as a brooding but very sympathetic figure. Nothing matters to him except for the woman he loves. It’s an obsession, but a noble obsession. Hauer does not give a conventional action hero performance. He’s much more subtle than that. We feel Navarre’s pain, but the pain is not on the surface. It’s deep within Navarre’s soul. He simply cannot live with Isabeau.

Michelle Pfeiffer is just right. The first time we see her we are struck by her fragile ethereal beauty. And we know that this is a high-born lady. There’s nothing arrogant about Isabeau, just the placid assurance of a woman who has known since childhood what it means to be a lady. Isabeau is definitely not a kickass action heroine or a feisty girl heroine. She has courage, but it is a woman’s courage.

When Phillipe meets her he knows that he is going to devote himself to the service of this lady without any hope of reward. To serve such a lady is an honour. What’s extraordinary is that Matthew Broderick and Michelle Pfeiffer make this devotion totally convincing. Somehow all three leads are able to make us believe that this world of fairy-tale romance and chivalry is real.

The Bishop of Aquila is not a conventional adventure movie larger-than-life villain. He is a man in the grip of an obession. It has lewd him to do great evil, but the obsession started as love.

Ladyhawke never really had a chance at the box office. It’s a very uncommercial movie. It goes its own way. It’s a beautiful fairy-tale romance and I adored it. Very highly recommended.

Isadora Duncan, The Biggest Dancer in the World (1966)

Isadora (sometimes known under the title Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World) is a 1966 BBC TV-movie based on the life of the famous but tragic pioneer of modern dance, Isadora Duncan.

The TV-movie was directed by Ken Russell. You might be wondering if you’ll see traces of Russell’s later style in this early work. In fact you’ll see more than traces. This is a full-blown Ken Russell movie.

Russell co-wrote the script with Sewell Stokes, who knew Isadora in the latter part of her life.

While Isadora was funded by the BBC and was screened on the BBC in 1966 it was always intended for theatrical release as well, and it did indeed get a theatrical release. It was something of a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. The success of Isadora made it certain that Russell would soon make the jump to directing feature films, which in fact he did in the following year.

The considerable amount of nudity certainly indicates that a theatrical release was the intention.

Isadora was made on a minuscule budget (we’re talking about the BBC here) but it was shot in 35mm and while it’s in black-and-white it feels like a feature film rather than a TV production. Russell was pulling out all the stops with the visual and it has all his trademarks.

Isadora Duncan was briefly a sensation in the world of dance. She was an apostle of dance as free expression. Her dislike of any kind of discipline carried over into her personal life.

Her star faded quickly and her wild lifestyle took its toll. She blundered from disaster to disaster.

She enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1960s, being seen as a kind of godmother to the counter-culture.

Russell resists the temptation to idealise or romanticise her. He doesn’t exactly demonise her but he makes no attempt to downplay her extraordinary self-destructiveness and egotism and spectacularly bad judgment. This was a woman set for fame, stardom and riches and it all fell apart and the disasters were all of her own doing. He also does not downplay her vulgarity or her stupidity.

Isadora did have a touch of genius, but a very limited genius. In the opening years of the 20th century her approach to dance seemed exciting and revolutionary - pure expression, unconstrained by rules or discipline. Just dance what you feel. Like all such artistic approaches it was something of a dead end. The vogue for Isadora waned, her wild lifestyle began to catch up with her, her extravagance left her dependent on wealthy lovers who eventually tired of her whims and her dramas.

After the First World War she went to Russia, feeling sure that the Bolsheviks would recognise her as a fellow revolutionary. They did not. She was soon penniless. Isadora’s politics did not go much beyond thinking that being a revolutionary was exciting and glamorous.

An affair with a drunken lecherous thieving Russian poet ruined her even further.

Tragically she ended up being remembered mostly for the bizarre circumstances of her death.

Russell tells her story as an absurdist tragi-comedy. Isadora remains oblivious to the inevitable consequences of her self-destructiveness and self-absorption.

Isadora’s rejection of rules and discipline made her, briefly, a star in the world of dance. It also doomed her to disaster in life. She was ruled by her passions and her emotions and they led her astray every time.

Vivian Pickles (a dancer herself) is superb in the title role.

Russell was not going to let a micro-budget limit his already soaring ambitions. By necessity he had to use some stock footage. He makes extraordinary use of footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.

This does not look like a TV movie. It looks like a Ken Russell feature film.

Russell’s productions for the BBC in the 60s cannot be dismissed as mere tentative experimentations. He was already Ken Russell. He had already chosen his artistic path.

Russell was fascinated by genius but had no interest in worshipful approaches. He liked to get under the skin of the artistic geniuses about whom he made movies and he wasn’t afraid of what he might find under the surface. He also made two notable films about artistic failures - this one and Savage Messiah (1972). They’d make a fine double feature.

Isadora is a major Ken Russell film and a great one. Very highly recommended.

Red Line 7000 (1965)

Red Line 7000 is late Howard Hawks film. Made in 1965, it was his third-last movie. It’s probably his least admired movie.

Hawks wrote the original story and he produced and directed. Red Line 7000 deals with motor racing, but not with the glamorous world of Le Man or Formula 1. This is the slightly more disreputable world of NASCAR racing. This is certainly a deliberate choice by Hawks. He’s not interested in the glamour. He’s interested in what makes these men tick.

Hawks was fascinated by the idea of exploring the psychology of men who dice with death. He was particularly fascinated by men who dice with death even though they don’t have to. Not soldiers in wartime or cops driven by a sense of duty, but civilians who deliberately make this choice. They’re not doing it for a cause. They’re not doing it for the excitement. It’s more of an existential thing. They’re flirting with death, taunting death, spitting in the eyes of death. And all the time knowing that death will have the last laugh. Maybe they’re half in love with death.

Hawks was also fascinated by the women who love these men.

So the basic setup is there for a classic Howard Hawks movie. But that doesn’t seem to be what he had in mind. It seems like he was trying to make a movie aimed at a young audience. In fact it’s almost as if he tried to make a drive-in movie. There are some very definite exploitation movie elements. You have never seen so many car crashes. Every time the action moves to the racetrack you can be sure there will be crashes. Multiple crashes. Cars in flames. Cars going end over end.

This is the sort of thing a drive-in audience would love. But this was a major-studio picture distributed by Paramount and there was no way that Paramount would have had a clue how to market it.

It needed a Roger Corman to market it. It’s a movie that should have been made by AIP. Red Line 7000 was in fact shot on a very low budget. Mainstream critics were always going to hate it, and they did. Mainstream audiences would have been perplexed. Where are the big stars?

Which brings us to the cast. Hawks went for an entire cast of unknowns. The only big name is James Caan, but in 1965 he was not yet a star. Hawks presumably wanted to avoid having the movie loaded down with stars, which would have created the expectation that this was going to be a star vehicle for one or two big names. It isn’t. There’s no central character. There are eight or so important characters but the focus shifts constantly between them.

There are three drivers. Mike Marsh (James Caan) is the ice-cold professional who cares about nothing other than racing. Dan McCall (Skip Ward) had tried to break into Formula but now he’s back to NASCAR racing. Ned Arp (John Robert Crawford) is the hotshot punk, a nobody determined to be a somebody.

The first of the women is Julie (Laura Devon), the sister of the manager of the racing team. She falls for Ned Arp. The second is French girl Gabrielle (Marianna Hill). She had been Dan’s girlfriend but they’ve split up and now she has set her sights on Mike Marsh. The third is Holly (Gail Hire), who keeps falling in love with racing car drivers who keep dying on her. Now, to her horror, she has fallen in love with yet another race car driver (Dan).

The focus shifts constantly between each of the three couples and between the romantic dramas and the dramas on the racetrack.

Hawks sent his second unit director Bruce Kessler out to film actual race footage so all the racing scenes are real. And they’re spectacular.

The acting is a very mixed bag.

This movie ran into huge censorship problems over the relationship between Julie and Ned, something that now seems bizarre and inexplicable. Major cuts were made.

Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this movie which doesn’t surprise me. I dislike Tarantino’s own movies but as a critic he’s perceptive and stimulating. He has, rightly, championed a lot of movies from the 60s and 70s that critics at that time were incapable of understanding.

Red Line 7000 is not quite what either Howard Hawks fans or mainstream audiences and critics expected but has its own oddball charm. I’m going to give it a highly recommended rating.

I’ve reviewed other Hawks movie dealing with similar themes. The Crowd Roars (1932) and Ceiling Zero (1936) are both underrated and very much worth seeing.