Haute tension

This movie is completely unreviewed, and the first time I saw it was on late night TV in 1990. The likely reason it is so unknown despite starring Ben Gazarra, Paul Winfield, Keenan Wynn, and Britt Ekland is because it just has too much to say about capitalism and economic exploitation of the third world for an American audience. In the mold of Burn/Quemada, WHo'll Stop the Rain, Three Days of the Condor, this is 1970s post-Vietnam revisionism during its heyday.

The movie opens with Keenan Wynn enjoying the fruits of his servants labor in an unnamed third world country, though the movie was shot in the Phillipines. A highly visible and obnoxious wealthy foreigner, he is kidnapped by a local guerrilla group who soon demand a large ransom. Gazarra plays the man forced out of mercenary retirement to go rescue him when Wynn's multinational prefers not to negotiate or pay up.

Unlike the jungle justice films that appeared in the 1980s, this one employs a distinctly unresolved and unhappy chain of events as just about everything that can go bad does, and Gazarra finds himself in the worst case scenario he could've imagined reluctantly going in.

Despite this, it's not a preachy film, and Gazarra and Winfield's attack on the rebel base is well-planned and realistically executed action. What distinguishes this film is how it inserts little moments of unjust actions and tragedy to poison any fist-pumping moments or simple right/wrong analyses.

Gazarra doesn't only hurt people he might admire to save a degenerate who deserves to die, but it costs him everything as the best laid plans go awry. This movie says much along the way about masters, servants, colonialism as well as exposing a believable black humor among mercenaries, including a truly tragic and jarring parting of ways between the partners. I don't think it's an accident that it doesn't make any showings in the USA, and can only be found used on VHS. I'm still waiting for it to show up on the THIS channel. It has much in common with Wild Geese, but is even darker, if that is possible. In WIld Geese, the enemy is not sympathetic, In High Velocity they are better people than the villains and heroes both, although even they are flawed. You get a finale sense of the rank stupidity and confusion of violent conflict and how distant elites in the loftiest realms hold all the cards over the world.

There aren't many missteps in this film, except maybe B-grade film stock, which only adds to its mystique ultimately, but it would be nice to see a new transfer.

I too stumbled on High Velocity years ago, at a drive-in triple bill or on late night TV, I don't remember which. What I do remember was thinking, "What the heck!!!?"

Lately I hunted down a VHS copy of this movie on e-bay and viewed it again. Perhaps my politics, or the times we live in, have changed sufficiently, because the plot doesn't seem quite so outrageous now as it did when I first saw this movie. Or maybe I've seen more films from Hong Kong, China & Japan ; I notice now that High Velocity was produced by Takashi Ohashi. In any case, the cast is excellent, with Ben Gazzara playing a likable and sincere ex- soldier, Paul Winfield as his crazy partner, Keenan Wynn, the big rich sweaty slob with a high voice, Alejandro Rey, a greasy bureaucrat, and Britt Ekland is, of course, the babe. I've read elsewhere that the original music was remarkable. This film itself is a bit dark and grainy, as if it was shot under exposed on 16mm stock and blown up to 35mm, but perhaps that just adds to the cheap look and trashy feeling of the whole sleazy enterprise, which is more appropriate for such tales than the usual gorgeous jungles of the popular war pictures .

As a Viet Nam veteran, I found High Velocity, which is set in the Philippines in the early 1970s, to be a better, truer picture about Americans fighting in SE Asia than Camino's "The Deer Hunter", Cappola's "Apocalypse Now" or Spottiswoode's "Air America" (gag!). If you like mercenaries/war movies about spooks killing and carrying on, check this one out.

Taut, unexpectedly gripping mid-shelf thriller stars Ben Gazzara as Baumgartner, ex-Ranger Captain from the Vietnam War and now semi-retired crop duster in an unnamed, corruption-riddled military junta. He's trying to eke out his own little patch of paradise but the powers-that-be won't let him, as he's blackmailed by corporate snake Alejandro Martel (Alejandro Rey) into rescuing his company's repellent American CEO Anderson (Keenan Wynn) from a guerrilla stronghold in rebel-held territory. Killing's a business for Baumgartner and he's reluctantly back on the payroll, as his ex-Nam buddy, the equally jaded African-American Woody, and they both don the camouflage warpaint and head up the river -literally and figuratively - with a small arsenal of crossbows and explosives. Unfortunately for Anderson his head's full of corporate secrets, and Martel instructs Baumgartner to leave Anderson for dead rather than bring problems back home for him and his mistress, Anderson's listless wife Marie (Britt Ekland).

I call High Velocity "mid-shelf" as it appears to exist somewhere between an A and a B feature, with Gazzara (in Cassavette's Killing Of A Chinese Bookie the same year) giving his role class and grit in equal measures, and with the usually dependable Ekland, here little more than window dressing, providing the glamor. Eddie Romero's long-time collaborator Mike Parsons – as actor, co-producer and screenwriter throughout the Sixties – adds local flavor to director Remi Kramer's script, lending the film an authenticity: the cockfight, the drunken machismo, the omnipresent military (this WAS filmed during Martial Law, remember), and the requisite titty bar loaded on stage and off with doomed white expatriate faces. The character names are Filipino, the unsubtitled dialog's Tagalog, and-the-army versus rebels backdrop (for the so-called "Gang of 45", read the Philippines' communist NPA) is all too familiar to a Filipino audience.

It's an interesting smart-pulp improvement on the familiar "mercenaries rescue kidnapped Westerner from enemy territory" scenario, and not just because of Gazzara's gnarled, laconic delivery, and enjoyable dynamic and snappy banter between him and the as-gnarled Woody. For starters, our sympathies certainly don't lie with the Ugly American Anderson, played as a barking brutarian, vainglorious and vein-popping popinjay by an over-the-top Wynn, nor with his multi-national corporation, whose conspicuous extravagances are proudly on display. The opening polo match, from which Anderson is snatched, hammers the point home to perfection: polo-playing royalty inside their palatial walls, watched by their resentful, threadbare subjects through the gate's cell-like bars.

So do we cheer for the left-wing guerrillas led by Commander Habagat (Joonee Gamboa), themselves white-anted by corruption and desire for power, and all too eager to commit the ghastliest of deeds so long as they're sanctified by the noblest of motives? Or does High Velocity labor under the right-wing libertarian notion that the individual, and not the power structures that hold his true spirit in chains, can triumph? Certainly Baumgartner is only too happy to blast apart the rebels' huts to save his and his wife's skins, and doing the corporation's dirty work in the process; in High Velocity's unmarked hellhole, life is cheap, if not instantly disposable, and is ultimately measured by how strongly one feels the survival urge. Subsequently, there are no cheats nor sappy clichéd resolutions as the film hurtles towards its sour conclusion. Grim, satisfying stuff.