Movie Monday: Man Hunt

It's 1941, and the Nazis are on a Man Hunt!

Any movie that starts with someone about to assassinate Hitler is a-ok with me, let's dig in!

In the thick woods outside The Berghof, Big Game Hunter Captain Alan Thorndyke (Walter Pidgeon) is lying low with his rifle, drawing his crosshairs over none other than Adolf Hitler himself:

Thorndyke has multiple clear shots at Hitler, but he doesn't pull the trigger. Then he finally does, and we see he didn't bother to put any bullets in the chamber. What the heck is going on here?

While continuing to lie there, Thorndike is discovered by an SS officer, beaten up, and shortly he is put before Major Quive-Smith (George Sanders), who is a fellow hunter and seems to admire the man. Thorndike reveals that he hunts as a test of skill, not for the kill: he just wanted to prove to himself he could get to Hitler, but didn't actually even intend to shoot him. The Major of course doesn't believe this, and subjects Thorndike to a series of beatings in an attempt to get him to sign a paper saying he is a foreign agent and his goal was assassination. Thorndike refuses, so the Major decides to have him him killed but make it look as though it's an accident to avoid a diplomatic incident (Thorndike's brother being a very well connected diplomat).

But thanks to some blind luck, Thorndike survives and hides out on a Danish ship and is befriended by a cabin boy named Vaner (Roddy McDowall). The Nazis learn Thorndike is alive, and hire an agent named Mr. Jones (John Carradine) to find him. Thorndike is spotted and hides out thanks to the help of a young woman named Jerry Stokes (Joan Bennett), who gives him money to get back to England.

However, Thorndike learns that, thanks to the British government's current policy towards Germany (i.e., appeasement), if he is caught it would become a giant problem for his brother and his home country, Thorndike decides to hide in Africa. But before he can do that, he learns that Jones (as well as Quive-Smith) are on his tail, leading to a great, tense scene in the London Underground:

Thorndike decides to lay low in a nearby cave(!), but he soon learns that Quive-Smith has found him out. Regarding Thorndike as a worthy adversary, the Nazi goes so far as to warn his prey via a telegram waiting for Thorndike at a nearby post office:

All of this leads to a very unusual final confrontation, where our two protagonists are never actually on the screen at the same time (Man Hunt 2: The Wrath of Quive-Smith!), and they spend some time arguing their philosophies of life. Yeah, it's a Fritz Lang movie all right!


Other than change of tone mid-stream (pretty much once Bennett enters the picture), Man Hunt is a solid, tense thriller with a lot on its mind. Thorndike is a truly unusual hero, someone not terribly interested in killing Hitler, despite pretty much everyone else in Europe feeling otherwise. He ends up changing his tune of course, and the film ends where it began, another unusual twist.

There are some trademark visual touches courtesy of Lang (whose name in the credits inspired me to watch this in the first place), like the wonderfully ominous Nazi headquarters set:

 

Man Hunt is available via Netflix Streaming, and it's well worth the time to check it out. It gives you what you expect, plus a lot more.

Movie Monday: Follow The Boys

Do your part and Follow The Boys!

While musicals as a film genre are back, this particular subset of film musical is most forgotten relic of bygone days: the all-star musical revue, designed entirely to boost morale during the dark days of World War II.

The plot, such as it is, centers on Tony (George Raft) who, along with his sister and father, are part of a vaudeville act that is quickly going out of style. They move to California to look for work, and soon Tony is part of the stage show of an entertainer named Vera Zorina (Gloria Vance). Tony and Vera fall in love, but their relationship hits the skids when the war breaks out and Vera thinks Tony is trying to get out of serving (he's actually 4F because of a bad knee).

Wanting to help the war effort and get back on Vera's good side, he puts together a truly amazing USO show, and what a line-up! The Andrews Sisters, Donald O'Connor, Dinah Shore, Lon Chaney Jr., Randolph Scott, Sophie Tucker, Maria Montez, Jenette MacDonald, and W.C. Fields doing trick pool shots!

The act I'm leaving out--and the reason I tracked this film down back in the 90s when it was only available on VHS--is none other than Orson Welles, who performs a magic act alongside his victi--er, partner, Marlene Dietrich!

Orson saws Marlene in half, all the while delivering charming patter that is reminiscent of the monologues Welles did during his Mercury Theater radio shows. It's utterly delightful, and basically worth the price of admission.

The film's plot essentially stops cold for all these acts, which are shot in long, continuous takes, in a proscenium style. Occasionally there are cuts back to our boys enjoying themselves, but during the middle section of the movie it feels like you're there in the audience along with the soldiers.

The plot picks back up again, but at this point I don't think anyone really cares. At almost two hours, it's way too long--it probably would have been just as, if not more, effective to drop all the plot stuff and just shoot this as a sort of concert film. There's not much existing footage of Orson Welles, immediately post-Citizen Kane, doing his magic act, so I could have watched a lot more of this!

So while Follow The Boys is pleasant enough, I bet you can find all the celebrity acts on the internet, and that's probably the best way to see them. In fact, here's Orson's bit with Marlene in full. Thanks YouTube!

Back Issue! #72 On Sale Now!

The newest issue of TwoMorrows' Back Issue! is on sale now, and features a feature article by me about DC superhero Red Tornado, in the longest piece I have written for the magazine to date:

(Click to embiggen)

The theme for this issue is Robots, and there's lots of fun stuff in there as always. Click here to buy yourself a copy!

Movie Monday: Escape From L.A.

We've escaped from New York, now it's time to Escape From L.A.!

I, like many people from my generation, love the films of John Carpenter. From Assault on Precinct 13 to Halloween to The Fog to Escape From New York to The Thing to Christine to Starman to Big Trouble in Little China, Carpenter spent a decade on an amazing hot streak, crafting a string of classics that are still being watched and analyzed to this day.

He hit a bit of a slow patch in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and his style of tough, no-nonsense filmmaking seemed at the odds with the nascent era of blockbuster film production. But I can remember being excited that he and his most frequent collaborator, Kurt Russell, were returning for their first sequel, Escape From L.A.!

Then, of course, I saw it, and was thoroughly disappointed. Aside from its many faults, the thing that bothered me the most about it was...it was just lame. And coming from someone as tough and funny and inventive as Carpenter, that to me seemed like the worst sin of all.

Flash forward twenty years (wow, really?), and I've been re-watching a lot of Carpenter's films, and getting impressed all over again. And I'm not the only one: Hollywood has been churning out remakes or prequels of his most renowned films (Rob Zombie's Halloween, the 2011 Thing), so I thought it might be worthwhile to go back and check out Escape From L.A. again to see if it seems different than I how I remembered it.

Set in 2013(!), this new vision of the future features a U.S. President-for-life (Cliff Robertson), a theocrat who has banished all the citizens who do not conform to his more moral version of America to Los Angeles, which has been turned into an island after a massive earthquake flooded a large chunk of Southern California.

Of course, this leads to a bit of trouble, like when revolutionary Cuervo Jones (Georges Corraface) has seduced the Preisdent's daughter Utopia (A.J. Langer) and brainwashed her into stealing the codes to a super weapon called a Sword of Damocles, which via satellites can knock out all the electronic devices in the country. This cannot stand of course, so the government hires the one man who can sneak into Los Angeles and get Utopia out: Snake Plissken!

Snake is injected with a fatal toxin that he will only get the cure for if he completes his mission, ensuring he'll go along. After what seems like an interminable set up where we go over all the rules and gadgets Snake will be dealing with (delivered by Stacy Keach--swinging for the fences--and Michelle Forbes), Snake uses a private submarine to get onto the island where he runs into an aging hippie named Pipeline (Peter Fonda, of course) and a squirrely shyster named Eddie, who sells "Maps to the Stars" (Steve Buscemi).

Snake makes his first attempt at Cuervo and Utopia during a quasi-parade designed to rile up the rabble:

This first attempt (shot at an astonishingly relaxed face for an action sequence) fails, so Snake searches for an old friend, who has since become a transsexual named Hershe Las Palmas played by Pam Grier. With the help of Hershe's gang and some hang gliders, Snake makes another try at Cuervo and tries to recover the remote control for the Sword of Damocles.

There are, of course, a number of action sequences, but not a one of them is exciting or thrilling or scary. It feels like Carpenter is bored, except during the most infamous scene: Snake Plissken and Pipeline surfing down a Los Angeles street, complete with the two of them high-fiving that reminded me of something you would have seen in the Batman TV series:

Escape From L.A. ends on a similar WTF note that the first film did, which feels like the one genuine piece of vintage Carpenter: cynical and unromantic, it points toward a world that's even worse than the one we've just seen on display in the film.

As I mentioned above, I love John Carpenter's films, and it actually personally bothers me to say anything negative about his work. But unfortunately Escape From L.A. is no better than how I remembered it at the time: the special effects are horrendous, the action scenes are slow and uninvolving, and the story is just plain absurd: Corraface never seems remotely imposing enough to be in control of a whole city full of criminals, Buscemi is not terribly funny, Grier is wasted, and Peter Fonda just doesn't belong here at all. As for Russell, it's not like Snake Plissken is a terribly deep character, but here he delivers all his lines in this overly cartoony, clipped growl that just seems kinda ridiculous.

I think the main problem here is, the manner that John Carpenter makes his films is just at odds with major studio filmmaking, especially as it was circa 1996: you can almost feel him struggling to break free of the strictures placed on him by studio executives (when the CGI is so bad, why not just do it all as practical effects, like he had to back with the original?). Unfortunately, it seems as though those problems only got worse, until Carpenter essentially retired fro filmmaking entirely.

Many current filmmakers cite Carpenter as a major influence, surely one of them (Tarantino? Del Toro?) has enough clout and resources to hand the man ten or twenty million with no instructions other than to make a genuine John Carpenter Film? Despite his weak output of the last two decades, I'd buy a ticket for that film sight unseen!

Movie Monday: Operation Amsterdam

This week's Movie Monday is the 1959 British thriller Operation Amsterdam!

Set in 1940, on the eve of the Nazis invading the Netherlands, the British government sends a small team of operatives into Amsterdam to find...a fortune in diamonds!

The team consists of three men: Dutch diamond experts Jan Smit (Peter Finch) and Walter Keyser (Alexander Knox) and a British intelligence officer, Major Dillon (Tony Britton). They arrive on the Dutch Coast (having avoided German bombs on the way), and work their way past suspicious local authorities to find the diamonds before the Nazis steal them all.

Amid the chaos, they commandeer a car driven by Anna (Eva Bartok), who was stopped by Smit as she tried to commit suicide by plunging herself and the car off a pier into the ocean. They convince her to go with them, where Smit learns that she blames herself for the death of her husband's parents at the hands of the Nazis.

The group meets with Jan's father, a diamond merchant, who tries to talk the other local diamond merchants into pooling their stock to get it out of the Netherlands. Some of the diamonds are in a time-locked vault, which requires the team hiring another team to help break into it and get everything out in time.

Members of the Dutch police and the Nazis are on their tail, though, leading to some armed fights on the streets of Amsterdam. Anna shows that, despite her previous behavior, she is no shrinking violet:

The rest of the film is a race against time for our heroes to get the diamonds, avoid the Nazis, and head back home. Will they succeed?

I wanted to like Operation Amsterdam, really I did. A rag-tag bunch of experts, sneaking behind enemy lines to stick it to the Nazis, the guy from Network, what's not to love?

There is no one thing you can point to about the movie and say it's bad or wrong--everything is shot and acted with cool professionalism. Unfortunately, it's also pretty darn dull. We barely get to know our heroes before they're of on their mission (about five minutes in, really), and these guys barely ever say anything to each other, so outside of Smit and Anna's conversations, we never do learn anything about them. That's probably very realistic, but it doesn't make for gripping cinema.

I actually had to watch Operation Amsterdam three times to keep my interest up. Each time I'd get a little further, and then I found myself distracted, wanting to check my email, etc., and before I knew I had completely lost the thread. Again, there's not a thing "wrong" with the movie, it's just so tight-lipped and cool that I found it inspiring not a single emotion from me, good or bad. The DVD sleeve makes the film look like a slam-bang action thriller; I'm guessing MGM knew it had to pull some sleight of hand to get people to buy it.

Why did I choose this obscure title, you might ask? Well, the poster for it (which you see up top) hangs in the hall in the office I work at, and I pass by it several times a day. The poster is so snazzy I thought why not try Operation Amsterdam out? Well, now I know.