Movie Monday: Burke & Hare

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 2010 horror/comedy Burke & Hare!
 
I remember getting wind of this movie a year or two ago, and I was really excited over it: it starred Simon Pegg, who I'm a fan of, it was horror comedy, generally a genre I enjoy (and Pegg himself had great experience with, via Shaun of the Dead), and it was directed--after a decade-long hiatus--by John Landis!


I can say without any real hyperbole that I grew up on John Landis movies. As a kid, I watched Animal House, The Blues Brothers, American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, and Spies Like Us so many times that I can still parrot large chunks of dialogue from each ("Are you the police? No, ma'm, we're musicians"). Landis' career took a slide by the end of the 1980s, and for long periods of time he simply didn't make any movies at all. He had done some documentaries and some super low-budget things, but this was a period piece with big stars! A return to form!


I was not heartened by the fact that the film never seemed to play in theaters, instead going right to DVD. Not a good sign, but I'm familiar with the nightmarish vagaries of film distribution not to immediately dismiss a movie just for that. But then I promptly forgot about the movie, until I saw it on the shelf of my local library (just like what happened with Get Low). So I grabbed it!

Based on a true story, Burke & Hare is about two lowlife shysters (Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, respectively) in Edinburgh. Via narration by the local hangman (Bill Bailey, who appeared in Spaced and Hot Fuzz with Pegg), we learn that all corpses that meet the hangman's noose are shipped off to Dr. Robert Knox (Tom Wilkinson) who uses them for dissection. His rival Dr. Monro (Tom Curry), who wants Knox's job, since he is reduced to working on just the amputated parts of the living.

Thanks to a forged letter, bodies are then ordered to be redirected to Monro, leaving Knox high and dry. When the elderly border of the Inn owned by Hare's wife (Jessica Hynes, also from Spaced) dies, Burke and Hare decide to bring the body to Knox, who pays them for it. They realize there's money in this!

At the local tavern, Burke meets a young woman named Ginny (Isla Fisher) and is immediately smitten (understandable). She and her friends are all prostitutes who want to get out of that life, and Ginny's idea is to stage an all-female version of Macbeth. You see, Ginny considers herself an actress:

For Hare's part, he wants to use the money to open a funeral parlor (the idea of his wife's). He mentions this new racket to a real crook named McTavish, who kidnaps Hare and threatens him, saying he and Burke must pay half of their pay to him, for "protection."

This leads Burke and Hare to get a little more creative about where to get two bodies a week, going from grave robbing to out-and-out murder. Knox knows when a body has come to a natural end or not, but decides to look the other way as long as the bodies keep coming. Eventually, all these people dying gets noticed by the local law enforcement, who discover its the work of Burke and Hare, and arrest them. Helen and Hare's wife are also arrested.

The two are made an offer, that if one of them confesses, the others will go free:

Burke decides to confess, on one condition: that he and Ginny get to spend the night in the same cell. The police agree to this, and the two finally get to make love. The next day, Burke is hung, offering only this as his final words: "I did it for love."

The film ends where it began, with the hangman telling us what happened to everyone else after Burke was hung:

...the final scene is of a real-life medical museum, where Burke's skeleton still hangs. The End.

Burke & Hare sure does look great: the period detail is just right, and the amount of talent on screen is impressive: in addition to Pegg, Serkis, Wilkinson, Hynes, Fisher, and Bailey, there are roles, big and small, for Christopher Lee, Jenny Agutter, John Woodvine (both from American Werewolf in London), Ronny Corbett, Hugh Bonnveville (Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey), Stephen Merchant, even the legendary Ray Harryhausen!

The only problem is, for a horror comedy, Burke & Hare is neither scary or funny. There's lots of gross stuff, dealing with dead bodies and all, but there's never one moment that is remotely tense, and the humor is so broad and silly that I realized I didn't laugh a single time during the entire 95 or so minutes. As the film rolled on, I found myself shocked at how dull it was, despite being performed by people I am a huge fan of.

I can only guess the fault lies with the screenplay, and the direction. Landis mixed horror and laughs successfully in AWIL, so why Burke & Hare falls so flat is a bit of a mystery. When I think about it, it might be because the two main characters are too clownish to be taken seriously, yet what they do is so bad you can't really absolve them of guilt and truly root for them. Serkis' scenes with Hynes are so over-the-top and silly they reminded me of sketches from the old Carol Burnett show...then they'd be followed by some grisly bit about a corpse. It just doesn't work.

Which is too damn bad, because I was and still am a huge fan of Landis' work, and would love to see him return to mainstream movies. But looking at the general reaction to Burke & Hare (36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), it seems as though this movie is not going to be the one that does the job.

Movie Monday: A Bay of Blood

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1971 gore-a-thon A Bay of Blood!
 
You may be saying to yourself "I've never seen 'Bay of Blood'"--and you might be right. But considering that the movie has been marketed under more than half a dozen different titles--Twitch of the Death Nerve, The Ecology of Crime, Chain Reaction, Carnage, Last House on the Left Part II, New House on the Left, and Blood Bath--maybe you did see this movie and just didn't realize it.

A Bay of Blood was directed by Mario Bava, so you know the movie isn't going to be dull, no matter what else it might be. After watching a fly buzz around and plunk itself into a lake, the camera finds its way to a dark, quiet mansion that houses a wheelchair-bound old woman. She's clearly lonely, as she seems to spend many hours staring out the windows.

The solitude is broken when someone throws a noose over her neck and hangs her, watching her slowly choke to death:

There's lots of shots of the killer, hiding their face, and at first it seems like this is going to be a murder mystery. But then we pan up and see who it is, an older man (Giovanni Nuvoletti). Then the film takes another abrupt turn, as the older man is stabbed to death by a third person:

The older man's body is dragged out of the house, leaving the woman hanging. The next day, the police find a suicide note "written" by her, with no evidence of the second murder. What's going on here?

 

Two other people arrive, a real estate agent named Frank and his lover Laura. We learn they plotted with the older man to kill his wife, so they could all get their hands on her vast fortune and land. They seem unaware that their partner has been murdered, which means there's even more suspects!

 

This sets the stage for a nearly unending stream of people wandering their way into the movie, all of them either murderers, murder victims, or both. A group of young hippies (or whatever the Italian equivalent were) come joy-riding by and decide to stick around:

...Speed Buggy nooooo!

One girl goes skinny dipping, where she literally bumps into the corpse of the older man. She runs out of the water in terror, only to be chased and stabbed with a hook. Inside the mansion, one of the young men is killed, followed by the couple, who are flagrante delicto. They are so delicto, in fact, that they keep having sex five-ten seconds after they've been stabbed straight-through with a spear:

It turns out the killer is Simon (who we are first introduced to by biting a live squid to death with his teeth), the son of the rich older woman. He was in a triple-cross with Frank to kill off the older man, although I will admit it took me reading about the movie on Wikipedia to figure all this out.

That's because A Bay of Blood (or Twitch of the Death Nerve, or...) isn't about the mystery, because after a while it grows so byzantine that there's no way you can keep it all straight. No, this movie is about the blood, and how many different ways Bava can show the human body can be mutilated. The film features many close-up scenes of the carnage. Upon release, it was greeted with howls of disgust from critics, which I imagine what Bava was going for.

Anyway, by the time everyone has killed everyone else, we're left with Renata, a long-lost daughter, and her husband and their kids. Having killed everyone else, they stand to inherit everything. Except they are both gunned down by:

...their own kids! The young boy and girl seem indifferent to what they've just done, and go off to play. The End.

I guess you could say Bava was trying to make a point about violence, about how the deeds of the adults of course trickles down to the next generation, who will probably end up even more monstrous than the previous. More likely is that since the film is, essentially, one big ghoulish joke, ending the movie with such a downbeat, nasty final scene is only fitting. Other than the old woman at the beginning, everyone in this movie is rotten to the core.

As I am wont to do with the films I pick for Movie Monday, I looked up reviews for A Bay of Blood to see what, if any, the general consensus is. A lot of people consider it to be a horror classic, and maybe if you had seen a movie this heartless in 1971, it would rock you to your core. But seeing it in 2012, A Bay of Blood's impact can't help but be dulled; but of course that's not Bava's fault (the same way John Carpenter can't be blamed for the ten thousand cheap slasher pics that followed in the wake of his classic Halloween).

A Bay of Blood is enjoyable for its WTF attitude, and if you are a gorehound some of the murder scenes are enjoyable, if that's the right word.


Fun Fact: The makers of Friday the 13th Part II completely lifted the whole "spear through the people having sex" murder almost verbatim. Though, from what I remember, they didn't retain the couple continuing to have sex after the stabbing, an example of being able to play the notes, but not the music.

Movie Monday: Get Low

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 2010 drama Get Low!
 
As many of you know, I am a huge fan of Bill Murray. I grew up watching Saturday Night Live, and he undoubtedly is one of the biggest stars to come to prominence on that show. And his near-limitless talent has shown itself in some of the most interesting films of any SNL alum, from gut-busters like Stripes and Ghostbusters to quirky off-beat indies like Rushmore and Lost in Translation.

Unfortunately, it seems like Mr. Murray just isn't interested in working in movies all that much anymore, so when he does choose to be in something, I always make the effort to see it. In the case of Get Low, that was hard, because it only played in art houses and, even then, it came and went very quickly, despite the name cast. So I sort of forgot all about it, and then when I saw it on the shelf of my local library, I grabbed it.

The film opens with a shot of a house on fire. There's some yelling from inside it, and then we see the silhouette of someone escaping the flames, and running into the night. After a fade out, we meet Felix Bush (Robert Duvall), a man who seems to live a hermetic existence deep in the woods. Two young boys come by, dying of curiosity, and after they throw a rock at his window, he scares them off.

The local preacher (Gerald McRaney) arrives to tell him the news of an acquaintance of his has died, and shortly thereafter Bush surprises everyone in town by showing up, horse, buggy, and all. He tells the preacher that he wants to the church to throw a funeral--for him. The preacher has a hard time understanding why someone would want to throw their own funeral, and despite Bush's giant wad of cash to pay for it, turns him down, saying he can't buy his way into Heaven.

Overhearing all this is Buddy (Lucas Black), who works for the local undertaker Frank Quinn, played by Murray:

Quinn is frustrated with the business ("People in this town just don't die"), and when he hears about Bush's giant bank roll he sees dollar signs. He and Buddy take a trip out to Bush's house and offer to throw him a funeral, down to the last detail. Buddy is concerned that Bush might just be senile and that he's being taken advantage of, but Quinn convinces him to go along.

Quinn shepherds Bush through town, getting him a new suit, a haircut, even going on the local radio station to announce the funeral:

Bush wants everyone to come, everyone who "has a story" about him. To sweeten the pot, he offers a raffle. For every ticket bought, you get a chance to win Bush's vast plot of land after he dies!

The money starts to pour in, bags of it, which Bush lets Quinn store for him (which he does inside a very expensive coffin). Buddy continues to have, er, grave concerns over all this, as does Mattie Darrow (Sissy Spacek), who its clear once had an affair with Bush. After visiting the grave of a woman named Mary Lee, Bush walks in the freezing rain to Mattie's door, where they discuss their troubled past:

The "funeral" is thrown, and it attracts thousands of people, and with all the noise and bunting, it feels more like a concert than a funeral. Quinn makes a speech and then turns the mike over to Bush.

Bush reveals the deep, dark truth as to why he's doing what he's doing, and why he's lived like a hermit for so many years. It brings many in the crowd to tears, including Mattie Darrow. Having finally exorcised the demons that have haunted him, he can now "get low" (aka, die in peace), and while he's alone back at his house, we get a glimpse of what it waiting for him in the next world.

With such an amazing cast, I sort of wondered how Get Low could have made such a small ripple when it was released. From what I remember the reviews were mostly positive, so what happened exactly?

Now that I've seen it, I can better understand--Get Low is a classic near-miss. It has all the elements: great acting, unusual premise, and it looks great. But it never quite comes together to make a satisfying whole. First off, Duvall's character--despite being based on a real guy--is never really convincing as anything other than someone only found in movies. He's so ornery, so disagreeable, such a PITA most of the time that I don't believe anyone would put up with him for this long. They'd most likely just say "forget you old man" and go on with their lives. Duvall is, of course, one of the greatest actors of all time, but even he can't make this guy totally real.

Also, the film wastes a lot of time with the Buddy character, who hems and haws about what he's doing. We know that the big funeral/party is going to come off, so having a character constantly saying "I don't think this is a good idea" is just a walking, talking roadblock. It also doesn't help that this boss, played by Murray, is so funny and captivating: the movie really comes to life when he's on screen, and we really don't get to see that much of him. I wonder what the movie would have been like if they had a found a way to morph the Buddy and Quinn characters into one, giving us the chance to see more of Duvall and Murray together (as it stands, they have one scene featuring just the two of them).

Finally the big scene at the end where Bush confesses is very hard to buy. A guy who has said less than ten words to his neighbors in thirty years all of a sudden has the ability and desire to spill his innermost secrets to thousands of strangers? Again, it makes for a dramatic finale to the movie, but it's just really hard to take. (Strangely enough, I can picture Murray as Bush doing this; I wonder what Get Low would have been like if he had been the lead?)

I realize I'm probably being too negative on Get Low; it's not a bad movie at all and of course it features some amazing actors. It just feels like it could have been a small masterpiece; instead we gave to settle for merely Pretty Good. And if Bill Murray is only going to do a movie once a year or so, I want it to be worth his time!

Movie Monday: The Stranglers of Bombay

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1959 Hammer thriller The Stranglers of Bombay!
 
I knew that Hammer had produced lots of non-monster-centric movies, but this was one I had never heard of until I saw a trailer for it on Trailers From Hell (one of my favorite sites). To be blunt, the thing that really drew me in was the presence of an actress named Marie Devereux, whose bust was so massive that I was shocked she even got to be in the movies at all--here mere presence seemed, to me, something that could not get past the censors of the day. So the combination of sex and violence (inherent in the title, of course) made me think The Stranglers of Bombay was going to be a lurid, squalid little movie--and you know I'm always up for that!

The film stars Guy Rolfe as Capt. Harry Lewis, an officer of the British East India Company, which was not a government agency but was so massive and powerful it might as well have been.

Thousands of natives have been disappearing without a trace, and Lewis wants to know why. He consults his superior, Col. Henderson (Andrew Cruikshank), but is rebuffed--he is more concerned with company business, like why many of the company's caravans are disappearing. Hmm, maybe there's a connection?

Henderson opens an investigation, partly to shut Lewis up. Lewis assumes he will be put in charge, but is passed over in lieu of Captain Connaught-Smith (Allan Cuthbertson), who is pretty much a clown. Lewis tries to present his case to Smith, but when he is ignored he resigns his commission to investigate the case on his own.

Of course, we do know that there is a creepy Thugee cult operating, since we ge to see them and their creepy practices, like when they punish some more unruly members by gouging their eyes out with hot pokers:

The cult uses strangling as its preferred method of killing, due to the belief in a story that when their god Kali fought the demon Raktabija, every time the demon spilled a drop of blood, it turned into another demon Kali had to fight. So strangling is the way to go!

Lewis' houseboy, Ram Das, believes his brother has been drawn into the cult, and goes to search for him. Ram Das subsequently disappears, but Lewis (and his wife) learns he met a bad end when Das' severed hand is delivered to the Lewis' home:

About halfway through the movie, I was wondering when The Good Stuff was going to start. Sure, there was the eye-gouging scene (which really doesn't go past what you see above) and the severed hand, but for the most part the movie was Lewis arguing with his superiors, and it was all talk talk talk.

Finally, though, Lewis is captured by the cult, and tied to the ground. A cobra is let loose and it approaches as a mute member of the cult (Marie Devereaux, and her boobs) watches:

This is a pretty good scene, since you can tell that it's the actor, not a stuntman, who is getting so close to the cobra. You kind of wonder how they do it until once brief moment where a pane of glass can be seen, ala Raiders of the Lost Ark. Still, not bad.

Sadly, the absurdly pneumatic Ms. Devereux is barely in this movie--as you can see above, when God was giving out Cup Sizes, she got in line three times. Despite (or maybe because of) the low-cut top Hammer gives her, she's barely in the movie at all. Her scene watching the cobra attack Lewis is the only really good glimpse we get of her. Harumph!

Captain Smith continues his bumbling ways, even allowing the cult members (pretending to be innocent travelers) to join a new, larger, supposedly more secure caravan, which leads to more murders in the middle of the night. Lewis' pet mongoose helps his escape the cobra when it kills the snake, which the cult takes as a sign that Kali is displeased with them. So they let Lewis go.

He joins up with Lt. Silver (Paul Stassino), but little does he know that Silver is also a cult member! At one point he sees a scar that is the mark of the cult and shoots Silver. Lewis is then caught again by the cult, and set to die by fire. But he is rescued by Ram Das' brother who, under the control of the cult, killed Ram. Overcome by guilt, he frees Lewis, who finally convinces Henderson to send in the troops to wipe out the cult.

Lewis ends up fighting the cult leader George Pastell, the result of which leads to the High Priest tossed onto his own funeral pyre:

The cult is wiped out, and the film ends with Henderson giving Lewis a promotion for his efforts. The End.

I went into The Stranglers of Bombay expecting a fun, lurid, bloody little thriller, filled with heaving bosoms just like a lot of their monster films. And while we get a little bit of that here, there are so many scenes of British guys talking that, to me, it really makes the film drag. We know early on that the Thugee cult is real, so watching a bunch of characters argue about that fact is just wasting everyone's time.

Apparently the film is somewhat accurate, historically--a cult like this really did exist, and was supposedly responsible for thousands, possibly millions, of deaths. And the British East India Company systematically wiped them out. Hey, we all gots to make a buck

Check out the aforementioned trailer to The Stranglers From Bombay and I think you'll see why I was so excited to see this movie. I guess you can argue it did its job:

Fun Fact: This film is a bit of a Movie Monday Triple Play: it stars Guy Rolfe, who starred in Mr. Sardonicus, as well as Allen Cuthbertson, who co-starred in Captain Nemo and the Underwater City!

 

Movie Monday: The Big Clock

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1948 film noir The Big Clock!
 

The Big Clock stars Ray Milland, Maureen O'Sullivan, George MacReady, plus real-life couple Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Milland plays a man named George Stroud who, as the film opens, seems to be on the run from the law. He's hiding in the darkness from a security guard, narrowly escaping being found:

How, as Stroud narrates, did he get here? When, just 24 hours earlier, he was an upstanding member of society, a successful magazine editor for the mammoth company known as Janoth Publications:

This is the clock in question, an absurdly grand construction that sits in the middle of the lobby of the Janoth building, dwarfing the human figures that move around it. As a tour guide explains, you can learn what time it is anywhere in the world thanks to this clock, which was built specifically from instructions by Earl Janoth himself (Charles Laughton).

Stroud has been working for Janoth for a few years, and has had a meteoric rise. So meteoric that he and his wife (O'Sullivan) haven't had a proper honeymoon, even though they already have a small child! Stroud has to put in one last day before he goes on an oft-delayed vacation:

There's a fun sequence in the Janoth elevator, where in one unbroken shot we see people get on and get off different floors. Not only does it give us an overview of just how big Janoth Publications is (it seems to publish dozens of glossy, high-end magazines, covering all sorts of subjects), but its a fun visual trick, thanks to some nice back-screen projection. (Nerd Bonus: TV Lois Lane Noel Neill plays the elevator operator!)

Stroud runs a true crime magazine, and has been a whiz at finding bad guys even before the police. There's currently a suspect on the run, and Stroud assigns his staff to look into the case.

 

Meanwhile, there's a meeting held by all the magazine editors, and by Janoth himself:

This is Laughton's first scene, and he comes in and destroys the place. Janoth is a rude, condescending, arrogant tool, the worst kind of boss imaginable: he shoots down people's ideas, talks over them, and belittles them in front of the others. He's a total delight to watch, and Laughton seems to be having the time of his life playing such a dick.

Janoth talks privately with Stroud, demanding that he take up the new case personally, delaying his honeymoon yet again. Janoth fires Stroud, right on the spot, even saying he'll blackball him in the industry. Stroud doesn't seem to care, accepts Janoth's decision, and leaves.

On his way out, Stroud runs into Janoth's mistress Pauline York (Rita Johnson), and they go out drinking, so much so that Stroud misses the train he was supposed to take with his family to their vacation spot. Now a little tipsy, Stroud and York take a liquid tour of Manhattan, at one point stopping in an antique store buying a painting of two hands holding a clock, right out from under another buyer, a dotty lady played Elsa Lanchester.

Stroud and York go to her apartment, and Janoth sees a man leaving later in the night, not realizing it's his former employee. Janoth confronts his mistress, who mocks him to his face, leading this titan of industry to commit cold-blooded murder.

I don't want to say any more about the plot of The Big Clock, because there are more surprises to come. There's a bunch of great character performances, like George MacReady (Paths of Glory) as Janoth's oily second-hand-man, plus Harry Morgan (again!) as Janoth's seemingly-mute (he never utters a word) masseuse and all-around goon:

Morgan's character lurks around the edges of the movie, seemingly always in the background, glowering. He's a blast to watch, because he's a hired gun trying to blend in among all these high-end magazine types, and he sticks out like a sore thumb.

Also wonderful in the movie is Elsa Lanchester, as a starving artist who is a key to the whole case that develops around the murder. We meet her again at her small apartment, which is littered with kids, all from different fathers/husbands:

She and her husband only have one scene together, where they are at odds; I can only imagine how much fun they had doing it.

 

Eventually, the noose tightens around the people involved, leading to a violent conclusion (which the poster partly gives away, thanks Paramount marketing department) and a reminder that you should always watch your step around elevator shafts.

Anyway, I heartily recommend The Big Clock to any film noir fan. It's a load of fun, filled with great performances, nice twists and turns, and great sets--in these days of magazines and newspapers withering away to extinction, the movie made me nostalgic for a time I personally never experienced, when working for a magazine meant you got to go to work in mile-high, gleaming skyscrapers that looked like they came right out of Metropolis. It all looks so fabulous and glamorous, even with all the murders!

The Big Clock was suggested for Movie Monday by my Ace Kilroy partner Dan O'Connor. Thanks Dan!

 

Movie Monday: The Lineup

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1958 film noir The Lineup!
 
Like last week's Foreign Intrigue, The Lineup is a movie that sprung from a TV series, which ran from 1954-1960. A sort of Law & Order of its day, The Lineup focused on the procedural aspect of cops n'robbers, though as we'll see, the producers decided to ramp things up a notch when going to the silver screen.

The film opens with a slam-bang pre-credits sequence: a porter unloading passenger cargo from a ship tosses a suitcase into a waiting cab, which speeds off. The driver panics and slams into a police officer trying to stop him, and then crashes into a steel post. Its over the crumbled car that the credits roll.

Two police detectives, Lt. Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson, who appeared on the show) and Insp. Al Quine (Emile Meyer) investigate, and learn that a ring of heroin smugglers are now using innocent travelers as "mules"--stashing the drugs in their luggage and then retrieving them once they've arrived in San Francisco. The case they are investigating concerns some Oriental art brought back to America by a collector:

They have the man sit in front of a, yes, lineup, made up of porters, but the man cannot identify any of them as the one who stole his suitcase. Soon, the porter in question turns up dead.

The syndicate, worried about other shipments being intercepted, send experts to make sure the drugs are picked up successfully, two men named Dancer (Eli Wallach) and Julian (Robert Keith):

It's here, with the introduction of these two characters, that The Lineup really comes alive. Wallach's Dancer is a twitchy psychopath, insecure but with a hair trigger. Keith's Julian seems to be there just to keep Dancer from going completely off the rails, and their dynamic suggests just the slightest hint of a homosexual relationship. But of course that's left to the audience's imagination...

Dancer goes to pick up the shipments, and ends up killing anyone who gets in his way:

The third package came in with a single mother and her daughter, and Dancer has to try and pick the woman up so they can go back to her hotel together. Dancer has just enough charm, playing on the woman's insecurity about being alone, that she goes along with him and Julian.

Its at their hotel that they discover that the young daughter stumbled upon the drugs and, not knowing what they were, used them as make-up powder for her doll. Dancer flies into a rage, seemingly ready to kill both women, but Julian realizes that their bosses will never believe such a story, so they go against orders and meet with "The Man" (Vaughn Taylor) and explain what happened.

But of course it all goes wrong: "The Man" doesn't believe Dancer, and slaps him in the face. Dancer goes Coo-Coo for Cocoa-Puffs and pushes the wheelchair-bound man off a platform onto a skating rink below, in full view of dozens of bystanders:

Dancer, Julian, and their boozed-up driver McLain (Richard Jaeckel) take the women on a chase from the police, along the as-yet-completed highway system, which almost ends up with them dropping off a sheer cliff. With the cops on their tail, Dancer shoots Julian and grabs the little girl, using her as a human shield. But when he tries to jump from one overpass to the next, a policeman's bullet finds him, and he plummets to the ground, his body smashing into several concrete slabs on the way down.

The Lineup is extraordinary fun--tense and well-shot (it was directed by Don Siegel), its filled with great performances and some wonderful sequences set amid various San Francisco landmarks (the scene with The Man takes place at Sutro Baths, an indoor amusement park and pool, which burned down in 1966). If you're a fan of the City by the Bay, as I am, seeing what it looked like circa the mid-1950s really adds to the enjoyment of the film.

The police are fairly dull, nondescript characters, and even though they are in the very final scene of the movie they don't even get any dialog! Its clear the moviemakers knew that once Dancer buys it, the movie was over. Speaking of, Wallach and Keith make a great pair; the latter ever-so-slightly condescends to his high-strung partner; at first you wonder why he's even on this trip since Dancer does all the heavy lifting. Then it becomes clear that without someone to rein him in, Dancer is the kind of guy who would probably walk into police headquarters and start shooting after getting a ticket for jaywalking. For my money, I would have loved to have seen a prequel or something to The Lineup, featuring these two having more adventures. Nasty, nasty adventures.

Fun Fact: Keith has a scene with Jaeckel where he says this line of dialogue: "When you live outside the law, you must eliminate dishonesty", which was appropriated by no less than Bob Dylan for his 1966 song "Absolutely Sweet Marie", where he sings "To live outside the law, you must be honest." I get a chuckle thinking about then-17-year-old Bobby Zimmerman, sitting in a Hibbing, Minnesota movie theater watching The Lineup, and that line burrowing its way into his fertile brain. I wonder if Bob ever sent screenwriter Stirling Silliphant a copy of Blonde on Blonde?

Movie Monday: Foreign Intrigue

This week's Movie Monday selection is the 1956 thriller Foreign Intrigue!
 
Foreign Intrigue is another one of those movies that I had never heard of until I saw it on Netflix WI. But it starred Robert Mitchum, was in full color (unusual for the time), and the poster is aces. How could I go wrong?

The film opens with millionaire Victor Danemore (Jean Galland) leisurely strolling his estate when he has a massive heart attack, dropping him to the floor. Moments later, Danemore's publicist, Dave Bishop (Mitchum) visits and finds him, and is the last to see him alive.

Everything seems fairly normal, until we learn that Bishop knows almost nothing about his employer. It turns out that Danemore was a mysterious figure, and hired Bishop to basically create a public persona for him, out of nothing. Bishop decides to investigate, but no one seems to know anything about the man--including his wife Dominique (Genevieve Page), who seems to have barely any reaction upon hearing her husband has died:

Bishop is repeatedly approached by various shady figures, all of whom want to know the same thing: what did Danemore say, if anything, before he died? The more Bishop is asked this question, the more he investigates as to why so many strangers seem to care.

One of the more persistent is Jonathan Spring (Frederic O'Brady), who seems to keep falling just short of threatening Bishop:

There is a lot of talking in Foreign Intrigue. A lot. In fact, except for one brief punch thrown by Mitchum (at O'Brady), there are no action scenes in the movies at all. Bishop meets another woman named Mrs. Lindquist (Ingrid Thulin) who he seems attracted to. They're all involved with Danemore, and Bishop learns that his former boss was blackmailing different people who were once Nazis, all of whom were of course desperate to keep that little part of their lives under wraps.

There's a fairly neat scene of a bunch of guys meeting with Bishop in a sort of subterranean vault, where the truth about Danemore's dealings come out. Unfortunately, by this point the plothas gotten so complicated, with so many characters double-dealing, that I was pretty confused as to what the hell was going on.

The film ends on an odd note, with Bishop and Spring meeting up again and heading off together, talking of further adventures they're going to have but of course we'll never see:

...not The End?


Foreign Intrigue is a supremely strange film. It feels like its setting up to be a fairly standard Europe-hopping film noir, but the pace is so relaxed that there's never much of a feeling of menace or danger to Bishop. The main bad guy, if he can be called that, is O'Brady as Jonathan Spring, but even after their brief action scene, they're back to joking around with one another. The guys threatening Bishop are okay enough, but this is Robert Mitchum we're talking about--it takes a lot to make it seem like he's in danger. And these slightly nerdy Euro guys just can't pull it off.

Another odd element is the music--there's very little in the film, except for this bossanova-type thing, which is used over and over, and it cuts whatever little tension is to be found in the movie. There are scenes of Mitchum draped in deep shadows, which look great, but then there's a moment of silence and the music kicks in, bringing the scene to a dead stop.

The film was directed, written, and produced by Sheldon Reynolds, who was simultaneously producing a syndicated TV series of the same name. It ran from 1951-1955, and apparently part of its appeal was its real European settings, which of course were still fairly novel in the era just before mass air travel. Foreign Intrigue the movie provides a lot of beautiful scenery as well, and I'm sure Mitchum had a blast making this movie. But I feel like a documentary following Bob around while shooting might have produced something a little more compelling.