Andy's Film Blog: 1965

Showing posts with label 1965. Show all posts

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Red Beard

A doctor (Yuzo Kayama), having just graduated medical school in Tokyo, honing the latest in 19th Century medicine, and hoping for a prestigious post, is mortified when he receives an assignment in an impoverished Tokyo district's public clinic run by a gruff but compassionate doctor (Toshiro Mifune) known as Red Beard. Humanist, measured, and episodic Kurosawa work features characteristically beautiful and shadowy cinematography and the last collaboration between Mifune and the director, the actor portraying a very different sort of role but still embodying a powerful presence. Kayama is excellent as the young doctor and Terumi Niki is heartrending as one of his troubled young patients.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Saturday, January 28, 2017

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Three uninhibited, sadistic and robust women break a man's neck after a drag race and kidnap his girlfriend winding up in the company of a lusty old cripple and his mindless, muscle bound son in their desolate desert home. Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! outrageously subversive and suggestive with surprisingly sharp banter, amusingly animated performances and effective, relentless editing.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Welles' Bard Trilogy (Macbeth, Othello, Chimes at Midnight)

During a decades spanning period of self-imposed Hollywood exile that only saw his return to film Touch of Evil, Orson Welles crafted three Shakespearean adaptations. Having garnered a reputation, producers were often hesitant to work with him, and money was often scant. Filming on the fly over what sometimes amounted to years, these films would often suffer from sound or continuity but are as stylish and dramatically satisfying as anything the maverick director ever created.

Macbeth (1948)

Welles's 1936 stage adaptation of the Scottish play with an all black cast gained mass acclaim. Here, while sublimely starring in the lead role he creates a haunting, atmospheric aura on austere sets.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Othello (1952)

Othello is roughly cobbled together and even after a 1992 restoration, it looks very rugged. Still the camerawork is impeccable and the treatment is extremely powerful, again especially in Welles' performance

*** 1/2 out of ****

Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Chimes at Midnight is probably the best regarded of these works, and one that existed in obscurity until only recently. Depicting the friendship between Falstaff and Henry IV, the film is bold, bawdy, dramatic, laugh out loud funny, and affecting as it demonstrates Welles in full force as actor and director.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Monday, May 16, 2016

Pierrot le Fou

A middle class Parisian (Jean-Paul Belmondo) runs out on his life and heads for the Mediterranean with his babysitter/mistress (Anna Karina) who, in turn, is the target of gangsters. Though influential in its time and innovative in its approach and style, Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou is pretentious, beatnik garble, typical to its director.

** out of ****

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Juliet of the Spirits

A woman totally dependent on her disloyal husband comes to terms with her situation and begins to gain independence as dreams, memory, and reality all begin to merge. Federico Fellini’s first feature length foray into color, and segue into the fantastical, carnivalesque films of his later career is a bizarre, trippy, and mostly plotless journey into the subconscious told with brilliant direction and radiant color and imagery. Fellini’s wife, Giuleietta Masina, shines in the lead role.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Cat Ballou

A beautiful, brassy young woman (Jane Fonda) returns from school to her father's ranch where he is soon murdered by an assassin (Lee Marvin) sent by a development corporation. With the help of two con men she acquainted on the train home and her father's ranch hand, they contract a once great sharpshooter but now hopeless drunk (Marvin, again) to seek revenge on the responsible parties. "Cat Ballou" is a fun but slight and silly Western with Fonda appearing as beautiful as ever and Marvin turning in solid dual performances which won him, somewhat bafflingly, the Lead Actor Oscar.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

The Hill

At a military prison in Libya during WWII, a brutal sergeant major (Harry Andrews) subjects his prisoners to grueling and interminable tasks. When a new inmate dies under such conditions, his squad leader (Sean Connery) defies the warden and finds himself the target of his sadism. "The Hill" is a gritty prison movie from master director Sidney Lumet, made at the height of (and assumedly as an antidote to) Connery's successes in the Bond films, who proves truly effective here. He is supported by a well-rounded cast highlighted by Andrews, chilling as the barbarous R.S.M., and Ossie Davis playing a member of Connery's squad. "The Hill" must have served as inspiration for Rod Lurie's "The Last Castle", a tepid, similarly plotted film starring Robert Redford and James Gandolfini, which took to moralizing and lost much of the message that was demonstrated here (if it indeed sought to retain it). In his film, Lumet grimly captures the horrors of a military prison and makes a more profound statement on the human spirit.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

A withered and tried intelligence officer returns home to London after losing one of his undercover agents while trying to cross the East Berlin border. Following a brief respite, on orders of headquarters, he descends into an alcohol fused spiral and romances a communist sympathizer, in an attempt to stage a defection to the Soviet Union and capture the officer responsible for his agent's murder. "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" is an icy and utterly realistic (especially in the face of the then surging Bond series) adaptation of John le Carré's espionage thriller, handled exquisitely, in stark black and white, by directing great Martin Ritt. Le Carré's labyrinthian plot is presented clearly, and features a masterful performance from Richard Burton, playing the detached and disillusioned operative. Claire Bloom is also excellent as the naive innocent who becomes the government pawn. In addition to the great spy material, the technical details, and Burton's commanding performance, what elevates "TSWCIFTC" is its investiture in the tragic, human elements of its story.
**** out of ****

Monday, September 17, 2012

Darling

A gorgeous, shallow woman goes from bored housewife to Italian princess, literally screwing her way through London high society to the top, and burning all her bridges along the way. Julie Christie is phenomenal in her Academy Award winning performance, delivering a spot-on portrayal of a complex, frustrating character. John Schlesinger's British New Wave film, which he also helped develop the story for, is unexpectedly inflammatory for its time and uniquely directed, giving life to a cold and ugly story. On top of Christie's whirlwind performance, she is given great support from Dick Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, playing two of her stepping stone lovers. "Darling" is an excellent example of a directorial vision in addition to a tour-de-force performance.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Culloden/The War Game

In the mid-60s, BBC filmmaker Peter Watkins crafted two unflinching documentary style recreations of war, one on the small scale of an 18th century battle and the other on the effects of nuclear detonation, depicting the all encompassing horrors that surround these disparate conflicts. "Culloden" depicts the 1746 effort which marked the last ditch effort of the Jacobite Rebellion in the Scottish Highlands and the British troops efforts to eliminate those said people through economic warfare. Watkins' follow-up was the Oscar winning "The War Game" which, in exacting and vividly descriptive detail, demonstrates the firsthand results of nuclear war. Presenting both staged films as if a documentary crew were present, interviewing the participants and victims, while capturing the unfolding events, Watkins and his crew capture the larger horrors while providing the lesser thought of consequences of these radically different forms of conflict. In "Culloden" and "The War Game", Watkins presented two harrowing, all encompassing anti-war statements.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Thunderball

S.P.E.C.T.R.E. has hatched its latest mission under the leadership of criminal mastermind Emile Largo: hijack NATO nuclear warheads and launch devices while holding a major British/U.S. city ransom for a large sum. Now Agent 007 is dispatched to Nassau to rendezvous with the sexy sister of a murdered NATO pilot and do reconnaissance work into Largo's suspected illicit affairs. "Thunderball" is a mumbled, silly, but not entirely without enjoyment Bond installment. It features forgettable villains as well as sexy but equally unmemorable Bond girls, yet Sean Connery remains his usual, affable self. The story is uninspired and poorly constructed which particularly rings true in the underwater denouement sequences which is confusing and anticlimactic. "Thunderball" marks the first film where the formula begins to wear thin.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Doctor Zhivago

A Russian officer (Alec Guinness) overseeing a works project pulls one of the laborers into his office whom he believes to be his late brother's daughter. He then proceeds to tell of the love affair between the poet/doctor (Omar Sharif) and the girl's mother (Julie Christie), all against the backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution. "Doctor Zhivago" is David Lean's expansive and beautiful adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel. Adapted by Robert Bolt, the story is told in the kind of epic fashion that only Lean was capable of. In the leads, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie are quite wonderful as two people unwillingly swept up by the revolution. Sharif displays a quiet stoicism here that is really appealing and Christie is quite wonderful as a woman enduring the hardships first of poverty, then of tyranny. The supporting players are quite good as well including Guinness who is marvelous as usual, and Rod Steiger and Tom Courtenay who play two very different kind of brutes who are both involved with Christie's Laura. "Doctor Zhivago" is an engrossing epic from the legendary Lean, who by narrowing his scope to a handful of players, tells a touching and sumptuous story of the Russian Revolution.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Repulsion

After the success of his debut film Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski set out to direct his first English language film which he also cowrote, a disturbing psychodrama/horror film. Starring the beautiful Catherine Deneuve as a shy young Belgian who works at a London salon and lives with her sister, to whom she is strangely attached. When the sister goes on vacation with the married man she is having an affair with, the young woman begins to see specters and other visions in the house. After taking a leave of absence from work, she barricades herself in the apartment while falling into a state of psychosis where even more sinister occurrences are about to take place. Deneuve does a fine job in a tricky role where she hardly speaks and plays a character who is uninterested in sex on one level and fascinated by it on another. Polanski succeeds at making two kinds of films here, the ghost story with the boo moments and the psychological drama where we are drawn into the atypical behavior of the heroine. Polanski's considerable directorial skills are on display, and he never ceases to make a shot interesting, where in other hands this could have ended up being repugnant.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Sons of Katie Elder

Three sons arrive by train and stand with a crowd gathered at their mother's funeral while the eldest brother, not wishing to be seen by the crowd, watches from a nearby ridge. When the four brothers get together, catch up and tussle about a bit they realize that their beloved mother had been swindled out of the land they were raised on, and their father had been murdered six months earlier. Now the clan seeks revenge upon the person likely responsible for both crimes. The Sons of Katie Elder from director Henry Hathaway may not seem as grave as its plot description makes it out to be. Aside from an extended final passage comprising a shootout between the brothers and the villains, this is a surprisingly lighthearted movie where we see the brothers gamble, joke, drink, fight, and muck about with each other. Among the group is Dean Martin, who is a lot of fun as the gambler of the lot who'll bet anyone over anything and will never pay for his own drinks. And of course John Wayne, who made this film shortly after a cancer operation, stands tall above all as the eldest Elder and reminds everyone what a presence he was. Although I felt the film did get bogged down by that final segment, The Sons of Katie Elder is a rousing entertainment.