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.

Pale Flower (1964)

Pale Flower is a 1964 Japanese film relased, surprisingly, not by Nikkatsu Studio but by rival studio Shochiku (although it was independently produced). It’s a film noir but not a conventional one and it’s a yakuza movie but not a conventional one.

Muraki (Ryô Ikebe) is a yakuza who had just been released from prison after serving a sentence for killing a member of a rival gang. Now he discovers that the two gangs have joined forces, but there are no hard feelings.

Muraki is obsessed by gambling. He meets a strange girl, a fellow gambling obsessive. Her name is Saeko (Mariko Kaga).

They are drawn to each other, but not just by their shared love for gambling. They both feel somehow doomed, as if their lives have no meaning and no direction and can only end in disaster. The gambling is clearly symbolic - they both have a desire to play for the highest stakes of all, life itself. There are lots of gambling scenes in this movie.

It’s important to note that the plot has not offered us a single reason why these two people see their lives as having no value or purpose. It’s something missing within them.

Perhaps they fall in love. They don’t seem quite sure about that. Perhaps their obsession with each other is like their passion for gambling - it’s just a way to deal with the boredom.

The plot kicks in slowly but this is not a heavily plot-driven movie. The two now united yakuza gangs are facing a challenge from a powerful Osaka-based gang. Muraki will be a key player in the defensive moves against this encroaching gang. Muraki believes he will have a high price to pay but he accepts this with his usual indifference.

Ryô Ikebe as Muraki gives a very noir (and very good) performance. Mariko Kaga as Saeko is rather mesmerising.

Saeko is not really a femme fatale. It’s more that these are two doomed people drawn together, not to try to save each other but to share their doom.

Director Masahiro Shinoda claimed that the background to the movie was Japan’s political position at the time as a not entirely willing U.S satellite which he felt had robbed the country of a sense of purpose. This is the kind of thing that exercises the minds of intellectuals while ordinary people are too busy living their lives. I cannot see any political angle whatsoever to this movie, except perhaps that it does give us a sense of a society adrift, and individuals within that society adrift. But mercifully there’s no overt political content whatsoever.

Although stylistically they are poles apart in its own way this movie is, like Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter and Branded To Kill, an attempt to reinvent the yakuza movie. There’s an intriguing subtly surreal dream sequence.

The film is set in Tokyo but the location shooting was done in Yokohama. It has a very noir look.

It certainly has plenty of noirish impending doom vibes. But it’s not quite straightforward noir. Muraki knows that he’s headed for disaster but unlike the typical noir protagonist he makes no attempts to escape his fate.

Muraki’s motivations are to some extent determined by the yakuza code of honour but to me this doesn’t feel like a conventional yakuza movie, or even a conventional Japanese movie.

I got some rather French vibes from it. A definite whiff of existentialism. If Camus had written a screenplay for a yakuza movie he might have come up with something like this. It doesn’t feel quite Japanese. There’s some Christian symbolism. It seems to be about people finding all the existing belief systems (traditional Japanese values, the yakuza code, Christianity, materialism, consumerism) unsatisfying. So they’re left with a vague existentialism of a warped kind - a death fetish.

There’s also a fascinating hint that both Muraki and Saeko have an erotic interest in death, and particularly in murder. In fact that’s the whole basis for their attraction. Saeko is attracted to Muraki because he killed a man (that’s why he was in prison). But not only that. He enjoyed it. It was the greatest pleasure he had ever experienced in his life. Muraki is attracted to Saeko because she understands how he feels about killing. And then there’s a wildcard in the pack - Joh, a stone-cold half-Chinese hitman also in love with killing.

This is vaguely similar to the territory explored years later in Basic Instinct. In this case we have three characters with a sex-death fetish.

This is a very dark disturbing provocative movie. Very highly recommended.

It’s on Blu-Ray in the Criterion Collection.