Deadlock

Better than it has any right to be.

It's an odd film, is 'Deadlock'. It drags its heels pretty much from start-to-finish and can feel aimless at times, though to be fair it certainly does live up to its title. The performances from Mario Adorf, Anthony Dawson and Marquard Bohm are solid and are the main reason as to why I'm rating this as I am. The whole thing looks neat for 1970, too.

I can kinda see why others like this more than I do, but for me it falls short to what it was seemingly attempting to do. Location is cool, cover (not the current IMDb one) is ace, (much praised?) soundtrack is meh. Still, I'd class it as 'good' - albeit marginally so.

(1970( Deadlock DUBBED PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

Produced, written and directed by Roland Klick that has a man nicknamed as Kid (Marquard Bohm) attempting to cross through the desert with briefcase. And by the time he plops to the sandy desert. He is then discovered by a driver, Charles Dump (Mario Adorf) who at first was thinking about killing him but in some weird circumstance, he ends up saving his life by pulling the bullet that was stuck inside his shoulder. He does this by driving to a somewhat deserted small mining town who lives with a crazy girl, Jesse (Mascha Rabben) he sometimes calls her as his daughter and an crazy overweight lady, Corina (Betty Segal). And the Kid warns Charles about a guy expected to show up, his nickname is Sunshine (Anthony Dawson) as the somewhat deserted mining area was supposed to be their meeting place.

The movie was supposed to be in German but is dubbed into English and called "Deadlock" and by watching it, it is reminiscent to better movies made before it from "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and Point Blank and others.

Some of the existing problems with this is the fact that both Charles Dump and the Kid had opportunities to take advantage of the situations and both did not! Such as Charles Dump had the opportunity to just continue on driving as well as ignore the Kid at the opening and he did not. The Kid had the opportunity to have a gun battle with Sunshine and he did not. All this is asinine if you ask me.

It is with the opening shot that director Robert Klick defines mood and genre - a long shot of an exhausted man in a dusty two-bit suit carrying a suitcase and a gun approaching camera, coming out of the desert like some sort of gangster Moses. He passes out to die when Charles Dump (Mario Adorf) finds him and with him the suitcase that turns out to be filled with money. Dump takes him where he lives (the dilapidated remains of a mining camp) and a cat and mouse game begins.

It's pretty obvious that the script and by extension the entire movie was tailored to fit the found locations. The deserted mining town with the old buildings, dust seeping through the empty window sockets, adds a "lived-in" quality and production value no set can even come close to touching. We're talking about a superb location - ideal for the kind of bleak and atmospheric modern spaghetti western Deadlock wants to be. It's like some sort of mythic settlement left by its inhabitants for years to rot on the edge of the desert and forever vanish from memory.

The place tries to pass for some hole in North America - and the illusion is quite good, even the English dubbing is excellent by European b-movie standards. If Deadlock attempts a genre crossover between crime and spaghetti western, it's always done with the same wide-eyed fascination for America's mythic underbelly most Italians carried. And it's all the better for it.

After watching an interview with the director, it turns out that this mining camp was found in the Negev desert, somewhere between the borders of Israel and Jordan in the Middle East, and the movie was shot during or a little after the Six Days war with a lot of military tension in the region. Klick is right when he asserts that part of that tension and sense of adventure found its way in the actual movie.

Klick's direction is just as good. The cinematography and shot selection compliment the genre character of Deadlock - in many ways this is a tribute to maestro Sergio Leone and the spaghetti western scene in general. The sweaty faces, sweeping panoramas, dust blowing through the wilderness, extreme long shots and closeups, it's all here. And what's more, it's as bleak and violent as the best of those movies - it would certainly be in good company among Sergio Corbucci's ouevre. There's even a chaotic freakout near the end that is even worthy of the dinner scene in the original Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE in terms of schitzoid paranoia and violence.

However the bad and ugly in Deadlock come from the same place as the good. That it is a b-movie quickie tailored to accommodate for a superb location. While the acting is decent all around (Mario Adorf easily stands out and *gasp* he doesn't chew the scenery at all), the script leaves a lot to be desired. The cat and mouse games between the main characters become predictable and tired when you realize they serve no other purpose than moving the movie towards its inevitable climax. Even the addition of a third character, an accomplish of the kid called Sunshine that came to split the money, does little in terms of variety. Now we have three characters trying to betray the rest and get away with the money instead of two. The middle section amounts to little more than a series of "they did this, then this" scenes but the explosive opening and closing acts that bookend the movie really make up for it.

While no masterpiece (which it could have been), at its heart Deadlock is grim, raw and honest. It will be just as easily enjoyed by spaghetti western afficionados as followers of 70's visceral crime cinema - Peckinpah's BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA comes to mind. Fans of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN will certainly find something to appreciate here - even if it lacks the philosophical musings of McCarthy, at least on first look. I'd even go as far as say that for b-movie fans that live for the kick of discovering hidden gems, Deadlock is a must-see.

The movie is so slow paced that you may not like how it evolves. It also only has a few characters and a very contained location setting. But if you buy into it and do not mind that it tends to get violent, tends to have weird characters to say the least and sounds like it has been dubbed (the english allegedly original audio) - then you will have a movie that will have your attention from start to finish.

I really dug the weirdness of it, the setting, the character quirks and how it went on with the intertacting and backstabbing. Certain things are quite predictable - which may be because I've seen quite a few movies and because they rely on cliches too. Still a low budget sort of western, that might be able to tickle you in all the right places. Be aware of what this is and how its pace is and mood are ... and decide for yourself

I only wanted to check this so to hear how the music of "The" Can had been used and was surprised to see that the answer was: very effectively .... never really thought of Can's tunes as filmic despite the album Soundtracks but yes and very good here

The film is mostly to me interesting because of the landscapes we are informed The Negev in Israel sometime after the 6-day War; there is great use of a broken-handed wooden advertising board and many other cool touches photographic and landscape-driven

The actual tale is duller than dishwater the acting fairly good but not memorable

All in all would rate it a five or a six.