The Set Up (1963)

The Set Up is a 1963 entry in the British Merton Park Studios Edgar Wallace B-movie crime thriller cycle - a prolific and consistently very fine series of movies.

Arthur Payne (Brian Peck) has just been released from prison. He meets a man on a train who tells him he might have a job for him.

Payne is then approached by another man with a proposal. It will pay well.  He wants his own safe robbed. His story is that he is trying to catch his wife out - she has been selling off her diamonds and replacing them with fakes. There’s no risk involved in the job. Payne won’t actually be doing anything illegal. There’s no way the police can become involved.

Payne is a nice enough guy but he’s as dumb as a rock. He falls for this story although even a give-year-old child would be suspicious. Of course the fact that Payne has been in prison indicates that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Payne is so naïve that he doesn’t even bother to wear gloves when robbing the safe.

Naturally it all goes horribly wrong. Payne is now on the run, suspected of a murder.

Then he meets a cute blonde. Meeting a cute blonde is generally trouble but this is a nice cute blonde. She wants to help Payne. He has told her the truth about the way he was set up and she actually believes him. He trusts her and although he thinks she has betrayed him she hasn’t.

Inspector Jackson (John Carson) would like to believe Payne is innocent as well. He arrested Payne last time but he thinks Payne is fundamentally decent. And he finds it hard to believe that a petty thief would suddenly become a murderer.

Maybe Payne really was set up. But possibly he wasn’t the only one.

The strong cast is a bonus here. Maurice Denham as Gaunt is good, Anthony Bate is delightfully smooth and untrustworthy as Gaunt’s business associate Ray Underwood. Luanshya Greer is likeable as Sally, the cute blonde. I always enjoy John Carson’s performances whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy. Brian Peck has a tough job as Payne since we have to be on the guy’s side even though he’s been such a total fool.

Gerard Glaister directed this film and several others in the series but he had most success as a television producer. It’s hard to fault the job he does here.

The low budgets of these movies didn’t give directors much scope for being visually ambitious. The most important thing was to keep the stories powering along and the very short running times (usually less than an hour) helped here. If the script was good the movie would work. This one was written by Roger Marshall who had an outstandingly distinguished career as a television writer and wrote several of these Edgar Wallace potboilers.

The Set Up is included in Network’s Edgar Wallace Mysteries Volume Four DVD set. It gets the usual nice transfer.

As with all the movies in this series The Set Up was shot in black-and-white and widescreen. The Set Up is very decent entertainment and it’s recommended.

I’ve seen and reviewed a lots of these Edgar Wallace films, including several written by Roger Marshall - Ricochet (1963) and Who was Maddox? (1964). Some of the others I’ve reviewed are Number Six (1962), Candidate for Murder (1962) and Time to Remember (1962).

Greystoke: Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984)

As someone who is rather a fan of Tarzan I eventually had to get around to seeing the 1984 Greystoke: Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. This is an extraordinarily ambitious film and technically it’s extremely impressive. Sadly however it has to be considered to be not a total success. Part of the reason for its partial failure is its inordinate length - at 143 minutes it’s around 30 minutes longer than it needs to be. There’s just not enough substance to justify such a long film. There are however other reasons for its relative failure which we’ll get to later.

One thing that should be pointed out is that the name Tarzan is never mentioned in this movie. He is always referred to as John (his real name being John Clayton). For convenience I will however refer to him as Tarzan (which seems justified because the name does appear in the movie’s title).

It’s a kind of origin story. We not only get Tarzan’s childhood in the African jungle. The movie goes back even farther, to 1885 when Tarzan’s parents set out for Africa. Tarzan’s father is the son of the Earl of Greystoke and heir to the vast family estates.

We get Tarzan’s childhood in exhaustive detail. Too much detail in fact.

Tarzan’s first contact with civilisation comes when he rescues a Belgian explorer, Capitaine Phillippe D’Arnot (Ian Holm). Eventually D’Arnot figures out that Tarzan is the heir to the Greystoke title and estates and he persuades Tarzan to go to England to find his family and assume his destined position in society.

It’s obvious from the start that Tarzan will have difficulty fitting in. He’s fond of his father, the Earl of Greystoke (Ralph Richardson), but he is aware that he will always remain an outcast. He keeps reverting to ape-like behaviour. Tarzan wants to go home to his jungle but he is persuaded that he has a duty to his family to remain in Britain. The only member of the Greystoke household who is nice to him is the earl’s American niece Jane Porter (Andie MacDowell).

There’s a potential romantic triangle between Tarzan, Jane and the wicked Lord Charles Esker (James Fox) but it isn’t developed. There’s one love scene between Tarzan and Jane but it falls rather flat and is absurdly tame. Which is a pity, because it means we never really understand why Jane would consider giving up her society life to be with Tarzan. We expect a bit of passion but we don’t get it. The whole Jane sub-plot just doesn’t work.

This movie is very definitely not in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The movie takes the position that Tarzan’s only home can be the jungle and that the wickedness of English civilisation will destroy him. Burroughs was much more nuanced. His original Tarzan is a man caught between two worlds but capable, up to a point at least, of dealing with the civilised world.

Of course the message of the movie is that the jungle is good and civilisation (especially the English variety) is evil. Apes are good. Englishmen are evil. It’s notable that that there are only two European characters who are sympathetic. One is Belgian and the other is American. Every Englishman in the movie is either a buffoon or a comic-strip villain. This weakens the movie’s central theme.

I can see what this movie was trying to achieve. Early on it tries to give us a vivid picture of the complex social and family life of the apes. When you listen to the audio commentary where the differences between the various ape characters are explained it all makes sense but I doubt if the average viewer would have picked up on most of this stuff. And if your movie includes scenes that only work when the director explains them to you then this has to be accounted a failure. All it really does is contribute to the movie’s excessive length.

It’s a movie that aims at an epic feel, and I can admire that, but the real focus should have been on Tarzan’s dilemma - a man trapped between two worlds. The movie is sometimes in danger of collapsing under its own weight.

One of this movie’s many problems is that it takes itself so seriously. This is a Tarzan movie with no adventure, no fun and no humour. The danger of such an excessively serious approach is that the movie can end up becoming unintentionally ridiculous, which happens at times.

It’s hard to judge Christopher Lambert’s performance as Tarzan. He was clearly giving the performance the director wanted but on occasion it becomes unintentionally silly. Eric Langlois who plays Tarzan at age 12 actually gives a more effective performance.

Ralph Richardson gives one of his standard English Eccentric performances. James Fox is embarrassingly bad as yet another villainous Englishman. Ian Holm tries hard. Andie MacDowell makes a very insipid Jane. It’s difficult not to compare her dull performance with the lively sexy sparkling performances of Maureen O’Sullivan in the early 30s Tarzan movies such as Tarzan and His Mate.

Technically this movie is a stunning achievement. There is of course no CGI. The apes are guys in ape suits but Rick Baker and the rest of the special effects crew really do manage to make them convincingly life-like. Glass paintings are used extensively. The jungle scenes are a mix of studio and location work and look great. This movie is a fine example of the superiority of good old school special effects over CGI.

What this movie desperately needed was some brutal editing. There are too many scenes that are there because they look cool even though they’re unnecessary and slow the film down. Scenes like that belong on the cutting room floor.

Overall this movie is too long, too slow, too dull, too self-indulgent and includes too much heavy-handed messaging. It’s clear that director Hugh Hudson had zero feel for the source material. It’s obvious that Robert Towne (the original screenwriter who wisely had his name removed from the credits) had some good ideas. What was needed was a much better director. It is visually spectacular but I’m not sure I could seriously recommend it.

The Broadway Melody (1929)

The Broadway Melody has some historical importance. It was MGM’s first musical and it was the first musical to win a Best Picture Oscar.

With the advent of sound it was obvious that musicals would be a big thing, but the right formula needed to be found. It was no good just filming a Broadway show. A way would need to be found to make musicals cinematic. Paramount were already getting into the musical business and while Ernst Lubitsh’s The Love Parade is a delight it’s more or less an operetta. The Broadway Melody on the other hand invents a new genre - the backstage musical. Big musical numbers but also lots of human drama and romance and intrigue behind the scenes.

This formula would reach perfection with 42nd Street in 1932 but The Broadway Melody is a bold very early attempt.

It signals its intentions from the start, with some stunning aerial shots of Manhattan. This is going to be the magic of Broadway meeting the magic of movies. Or that's what we hope.

Songwriter Eddie Kearns (Charles King) has just got his big break. Big-time Broadway producer Francis Zanfield (Eddie Kane) has not only bought one of his songs, he’s going to use it as the centrepiece of his new revue. Eddie now thinks he’s in the big-time, which he is up to a point. His girlfriend Hank Mahoney (Bessie Love) and her kid sister Queenie (Anita Page) have a successful sister act out in the boondocks but now they want to try their luck in the Big Apple. Eddie is sure he can get them a spot in the revue. Unfortunately when Zanfield sees their act he thinks Queenie is terrific but he thinks Hank is no good. There’s going to be some tension between the two sisters.

And there’s a complicated romantic quadrangle involving the Mahoney girls, Eddie and a smooth operator named Jacques Warriner (Kenneth Thomson).

This provides the behind-the-scenes human drama. And the entire focus of the film is this four-way romantic tangle.

The Broadway Melody’s biggest problem is that everybody is going to compare it to 42nd Street and it’s just not in the same league.

It just doesn’t have that Busby Berkeley genius. In the Busby Berkeley musicals the musical production numbers supposedly take place on stage. But they could never be accommodated on any stage and could never be watched by a theatre audience since they can only be appreciated when viewed through the camera’s roving eye, from above and beneath and from various angles. We have left the world of the theatre and entered a world of pure cinema. In The Broadway Melody the production numbers are filmed entirely from in front, as if we’re looking through the proscenium arch. These are filmed stage performances. They’re quite good, but they’re totally non-cinematic.

The Broadway Melody lacks the cynical hardboiled edge of the Warner Brothers musicals, and that sense that the show must succeed otherwise they all lose their jobs and starve. That’s because the 1930s Warner Brothers musicals were very much Depression-era musicals. But this is not true of The Broadway Melody. It was made and released in the boom times before the Stock Market Crash. The Broadway Melody is very much a Jazz Age musical, and it has an underlying buoyant optimism. We’re all going to be successful and we’re all going to be rich.

This is of course a pre-code movie. Jacques Warriner makes it clear that he wants to set Queenie up as a kept woman and that marriage will not be part of the deal. Queenie makes it clear that she’s happy with this idea.

There’s one slightly disturbing moment. A showgirl perched on the prow of a prop ship falls 25 feet to the stage floor. She hits the floor and she doesn’t movie. She is taken out on a stretcher - and she is never mentioned again! The poor girl might be dead for all we know. But the show must go on.

This movie really is way too long. The ingredients are here, but the balance is wrong. There’s too much focus on the romance melodrama and not enough on the backstage struggles involved in putting on a show. The staging of the musical numbers is unimaginative and stodgy. It is worth seeing for its historical importance but it just doesn’t catch fire.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray looks terrific.