Bullitt (1968)

Bullitt (1968)

Director: Peter Yates

Starring: Steve McQueen

There are bad cops and there are good cops – and then there’s Bullitt.

Lieutenant Frank Bullitt is assigned the task of protecting mobster-turned-witness Johnny Ross by ambitious politician Walter Chalmers. However after Ross’ hiding place is somehow discovered he is gunned down by assassins and Bullitt has to find unravel the mystery of who tipped the assassins off and keep the angry Chalmers off his back until he does so.

So what can I say about Bullitt that hasn’t already been said? It features Steve McQueen in what, along with The Great Escape, is his most iconic role. It’s one of the most well-known action films of the 60’s and features one of the two most famous car chases in history. A car chase so famous that the rest of the movie is almost forgotten in the tire smoke it leaves behind. I had seen this movie before around fifteen years ago and all I recalled was that car chase. So now that I’ve seen it again what did I think about it this time? Yeah, it was great. I don’t really have much to say about it however but it was far better than I recalled. I’ll start with McQueen’s character first of all.

So far on my retrospective blog on action movies we have seen many types of protagonists from secret agents, hitmen, thieves, bounty hunters, martial arts experts, heroic everymen and ummm sports car loving murderous go-go dancers, but this movie is our first taste of one of action cinemas most common archetypes- the policeman who doesn’t play by the rules but gets results, dammit! At least that’s how I remembered it, but that’s not really the case as despite what the tagline wants you to believe Bullitt remains firmly on the good side of the law. There is a scene where Bullitt’s boss tells him to play by the rules and I thought ‘Aha, here we go!’ but then it’s the boss that tells our rogue cop to do whatever as long as he gets results and completely flipped my expectations around.

Bullitt is played with effortless cool by Steve McQueen, but the character itself is fairly unremarkable. I did like his introduction where he is suffering from a hangover, which is something we’ll see a lot going forward in movies like The Last Boy Scout and The Nice Guys, but my biggest problem with the film is that almost all the characters are completely forgettable. Okay so McQueen through sheer charisma is able to take what is not a very fully fleshed written character and give him somewhat of a persona, Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) is suitably slimy and Bullitt’s girlfriend Cathy is given warmth by Jacqueline Bisset, but they are the only three that stand out. I am writing this just three months after Robert Vaughn’s death which saddened me as I used to watch him in the TV show Hustle and it was nice to see a young version if him here. Cathy after seeing a dead body gives Bullitt a lecture saying how he’s jaded and Frank just takes it rather than saying “Hey look, I’m trying to find the killer of the woman you just saw!” which kind of grated on me a little, but I did like her overall and really enjoyed the fact she drove him around town after Bullitt banged up his Mustang. Also this is the first time we have seen a rather healthy relationship with our main character in one of these movies so that was a welcome change for me.

Speaking of the Mustang let’s talk about the car chase at last. We have seen a race in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and a chase in Dr No, both with awful rear-screen projection, but nothing that even comes close to this! Here we have real stunts with zero camera tricks and it looks amazing! Heck fifty years later despite the hundreds of chases that have followed this still gets talked about as being one of the best! That’s not just people ranking the car chase in Bullitt as one of the best because it was a pioneer in a sense of nostalgia because after seeing it again I can vouch that it is still as incredible today as it would have been in 1968.

Yes some have small niggles about the six hubcaps that fly off the Dodge Charger, how both cars keep passing the same WV Beetle and how the route taken by the vehicles makes no sense for those who know the geography of San Francisco but that’s nit-picking to the extreme. I rewatched Spectre two days ago and couldn’t believe how poor the car chase through Rome is with its bizarre empty city and find it staggering how a movie with a budget that must dwarf that of Bullitt’s can be so inferior and lack any sense of danger, suspense or excitement that a movie fifty years old has in spades.

The editing of the chase is incredible too and won Frank P. Keller an Oscar. The decision to put cameras on the bonnet of the cars is great, making the viewer feel nauseous and part of the chase. For me watching this as a kid Bullitt was also one big holiday advertisement for San Francisco which just looked amazing with its crazily steep hills and the film is still the first thing I think of when I hear the city’s name. Also when I was young I used to adore the videogame Driver (still do actually) which was a love letter to the car chase movies of the 60’s and 70’s. The game had so many winking nods to films such as The Driver and The French Connection (there was one mission too where you had to scare a guy for information which I think must have been a Point Blank homage) and it featured Miami, Los Angeles and New York as playable levels. However it was the other playable city I was obsessed with and that was San Francisco and spent I spent hours in the game trying to recreate Bullitt. The shot in the film from the bottom of the hill where we see the cars leap into the air, disappear from view before reappearing and jumping over another hill is stunning and I would play around in Driver’s time-consuming film director mode trying to ape that. The only thing Driver had that also made me fall in love with San Francisco which Bullitt somewhat surprisingly underutilizes in the chase are the trams. Guess we’ll have to wait for The Rock for that.

Steve McQueen again did some of his own driving in Bullitt, like he did in The Great Escape, and in fact the movie was made by McQueen’s company Solar Production giving me the feeling that the whole film made so that the petro-head leading man could race a car through the city as fast as he wanted to. You can see when McQueen is driving and when stuntmen Bud Ekins (the man who did the famous motorcycle jump in The Great Escape) or Loren James are in the Mustang depending on the position of the rear view mirror and whether it obscures the driver’s face. The driver of the Dodge Charger was Bill Hickman who was the actual guy who played the hitman and the all do stellar work.

Some people reckon that after the chase you might as well switch off the film and while my younger self would have agreed with them, I found much to enjoy afterwards this time. The chase is spectacular true, but I also liked the on foot pursuit through the airport in the movie’s climax and thought the stunt where McQueen lays under the driving airplane to be quite thrilling. Of course the chase is the highlight but I think it’s similar to the Crop-Duster scene from North by Northwest which yes, it is the obvious highlight and the moment you can’t wait to see when watching, but it is the context in which it takes place that make it even more special.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece you know that Roger Thornhill is being lead into a trap so the whole scene is already tense to begin with as you know there is going to be an ambush but you don’t know how it will reveal itself. It is the surprise that makes the crop-duster attack so memorable. Bullitt’s chase works in a similar way. Here we have an ordinary detective story that suddenly without any warning turns into a high-octane high speed pursuit through the streets of San Francisco. Imagine how incredible that would have been for an audience in 1968 who hadn’t even anything like this before.

I also think that limiting the movie to just the one massive action set-piece has another two more advantages. First of all is that in real life a nail-biting car chase would be just as out of the blue as the one in the movie is. The chase is the movie’s most memorable moment just as it would likely be in the career of a real life Frank Bullitt. Compare that to the unbelievable day Keanu Reeve’s officer has in Speed where he goes from saving hostages in an elevator, then on a bus and then on a train. Speaking of Speed that leads to my second point. Do you even remember the elevator or train scenes from Speed? The bus portion of Speed is so bloody fantastic that it completely overshadows the other two action set pieces. Let’s be honest nothing in Bullitt was going to top the car chase to why bother anyway? The punch of violent action in Bullitt such as the chase or the shotgun blast to the witness are more powerful and shocking for how rare they are.

I can see why the rest of the movie is overlooked. I said that the chase was pretty much the only moment I remembered when I watched the film in my youth and that’s partly because aside from a couple of moments in the airport it’s the only the part of the movie that has any sense of danger for our protagonist. Compared to how many scraps James Bond, Roger Thornhill, The Man with No Name and The One-Armed Swordsman had to go through and how hard they had to fight for survival Frank Bullitt as a relatively easy time of things. I also didn’t think the plot was all that exciting honestly either even if it did have a couple of plot twists that did surprise me.

So Bullitt has a plot I didn’t find too exciting and characters I didn’t find too engaging and that sounds like pretty damaging attributes right? Well usually they would be, but not here. Bullitt emerges above much criticism by just being so damn cool that it impossible not to love. The jazzy soundtrack is cool, the fashion is cool, the cars are cool (or at least the film makes them cool), the city is cool and McQueen’s girlfriend has a cool art job and awesome 60’s miniskirt. Heck, even the opening titles are cool! Oh and it’s worth pointing out once again that this film features Steve freaking McQueen! McQueen supposedly spent hours practising how to get out of a car in order to make it look as cool as possible. He also took every redundant word of dialogue for his character out the script which gave him his usual laconic, laid-back vibe. The man is a legend. Yeah like You Only Live Twice you could say that without its big scene, this being the car chase, the movie would be much weaker but it’s a moot point as the car chase is there and is sublime and elevates a decent cop thriller into an iconic action movie classic.

9/10- One of the coolest films ever made and featuring a car chase that is still one of cinemas greatest.

Best quote: The exchange with the useless witness who under pressure finally gives Frank’s colleague some helpful information. “Am I helping you, sir?” “I never had it so good.”

Best scene: The car chase.

Kick-ass moment: You could take any one shot from the chase and that would be an acceptable answer here. I also loved Bullitt’s reveal to Chalmers that he had them protecting the wrong man, but the moment that made me fist-pump was when the police chief unexpectedly gave Bullitt the leeway to do what he wanted as long as he got results.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we are going back to the West which Once Upon a Time was quite wild.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Starring: Sean Connery

Welcome to Japan, Mr Bond.

During a routine space mission a US shuttle mysterious goes missing just after a second vessel is detected on their radars. The Americans blame the Russians and with the two superpowers almost coming to blows it’s up to the British and James Bond to prevent the cold war warming up.

Sean Connery is back once again in James Bond’s fifth adventure You Only Twice and if I had to choose just one word to describe this movie I’d have to go with ‘iconic’. When people think of a of a Bond villain they generally think of this movie. When people think of a Bond villain lair they most likely think of this movie. It’s the most parodied and lampooned film of the series and the movie Austin Powers lifted the most things from. In many ways this along with Goldfinger are the go-to examples of what a Bond movie is. However if I could use a second word to describe the film it would honestly be ‘boring’. It sounds crazy calling a movie iconic and boring at the same time but that’s just how bi-polar I feel this film is. I’ll start with the positives because what this film does well, it does very well indeed.

Okay I mentioned it briefly but we have to talk about the villain’s lair because it is simply an astonishing achievement. I have done nothing but praise set designer Ken Adams for his work in the first few Bond movies and the Ipcress File but You Only Live Twice is his masterpiece. This is the first time we see the face of SPECTRE leader Blofeld (the Great Escape’s Donald Pleasence) and his lair is a hollowed out volcano. The volcano has been mocked endlessly in the years since both lovingly and as a critique on the ridiculousness of the franchise as a whole but to see it in on screen it is completely convincing. The set is simply awe-inspiring in its size alone and then there’s a life-size model of a rocket, a helipad and helicopter, a working monorail, a retractable roof, a piranha tank with an automated bridge and the walls of the base that genuinely look like that of an empty volcano. It’s incredible easy to scoff at how silly the idea of building a headquarters inside an old volcano is, and yeah it is silly, but when you watch the film and you see it on screen it looks like Ken Adams has actually done it for real.

My second favourite thing about You Only Live Twice is Nancy Sinatra’s theme tune. Oh my goodness. It is just exquisite. Those strings melt my heart every time. Sinatra has gone on record as having been terrified when recording the song and actually asked the producers whether they would rather have Shirley Bassey back but she needn’t have worried as I think he voice here is as lovely as the strings arrangement that accompany her. The lyrics are kind of silly but when it sounds this good I’m more than willing to overlook them. There is a shot late in the film where the wonderfully named Bond girl Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) is on a boat with the sunset behind her and the song just makes the moment so magical. I think the song is so good in fact that it was only this time on what must be my tenth or so viewing that I noticed that the sunset is a terrible rear-screen projection.

Speaking of good shots there is one of Bond on the roof of a factory filmed from a crane that is stunning. We see Bond fighting some goons on the roof and then the camera zooms out and we get an amazing ten second shot of 007 battling and trying to out run twenty odd guys whist Barry’s excellent 007 Theme plays. It’s a breath-taking shot and for many people the best moment of the movie. I think when director Terrence Young left the franchise the Bond movies lost that classy feeling and with a couple of exceptions the Bond movies afterwards the films were less exotic and even kind of tacky at times, but the crane shot is a surprisingly artistic touch for a Bond film so kudos to Lewis Gilbert for that.

Another highlight is the gyrocopter Little Nellie. For the second 007 film in a row we have Q out in the field and here he presents Bond with one of his most memorable gadgets. It was not the first film to feature an autogyro but I’m sure for many people watching something that as Bond ally Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba) points out really looks like a toy actually fly and seeing it be assembled from four suitcases might have been completely novel. Also once again just like the jetpack from Thunderball it was another case of the Bond producers using all the latest gadgets available to make memorable scenes. The fact Nellie is equipped with flame throwers, mines and air-to-air missiles is just the icing on the cake. It was also an incredibly dangerous scene to film and one of the camera men ended up having their foot severed whilst filming.

That wasn’t the only element of danger that happened as director Gilbert, Ken Adams, the producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman in addition to the director of photography Freddie Young almost died. They were all in Japan scouting for locations and were booked on a plane back home but they cancelled their flight the day before they were due to fly and the plane they were supposed to be on crashed soon after take-off and killed everybody on board. The reason they cancelled was because they were invited to attend a ninja demonstration.

And that brings me to another plus- ninjas! The film’s use of Japan is fairly good overall and there’s an inspired part where Charles Grey’s character Henderson (who gives Connery a drink that is stirred not shaken in one of the best laughs) is stabbed through one of the paper thin Japanese walls, but it’s the use of ninjas that I love the most. There’s no great explanation I have for liking their inclusion other than the fact that ninjas are freaking awesome! Here we have throwing stars, kendo sticks with concealed blades and we even get a training scene that features a very brief one-take of a ninja taking down several guys with a katana that honestly rivals any shot from Come Drink with Me or The One Armed Swordsman. There’s also a fantastic moment where a ninja assassin attempts to kill a sleeping Bond by dripping poison down a piece of string. It’s inventive, it’s tense and it ends on a tragic note when it is Bond girl Aki (Akika Wakabayashi) who is killed instead.

This all sounds pretty good so far and yet I previously described this film despite its strengths to be boring, so why is that? Well sadly it’s largely because of Sean Connery. I know some of you are gasping and spitting your vodka martinis (or Heineken for the Daniel Craig fans) out at your screens right now, but I am sorry to say that Sean Connery is awful in this film. I am a huge fan of Connery and if you’ve read my four previous Bond reviews you’ll have noticed how often I’ve praise him and while I don’t want to give away my opinion on the later films in the franchise I’ll give a minor spoiler alert now and say that he’s my favourite 007, but it doesn’t change the fact that he might as well have stayed in Scotland and not travelled to Japan as he just phones in his performance. Connery was said to have grown tired of the role by this point and after making five films in six years you can’t really blame the guy, but it totally comes across on screen. He reportedly told the producers while making the film that this would be his last time playing Bond and he simply looks bored in the role and more to the point I am bored watching him. He’s also massively hurt by such a weak script by none other than beloved author of children’s books Roald Dahl. I, like everyone who grew up with his novels and short stories, adore Dahl but the dialogue here is so unmemorable. In Thunderball I had such a tough time choosing my favourite quote out of ten or so incredible lines but here I am struggling to find good one. The dialogue is as flat as Connery’s performance.

The supporting characters aren’t much better either. As a child I loved Donald Pleasence’s take on Blofeld, but I think that was only for the facial scar. In From Russia with Love and Thunderball Ernst Stavro Blofeld was intimidating. His character in those films had murdered his henchman who had failed to kill Bond and while we do get that here in his best scene when he drops Spectre #11 Helga Brandt (Karin Dor) into his pool of piranhas, but overall he’s just not just not very scary. In From Russia with Love that films main villain Rosa Klebb was petrified of Blofeld, but I actually think she should beat-up Donald Pleasence. I think Pleasence is a fantastic actor and I have enjoyed him in every movie I have seen him in but no amount of good acting or facial prosthetics could convince me that this very short softly spoken guy is in any way a threat to 007.

It’s unfair to complain too much about Pleasence’s Blofeld as he did well and I like his dead-eyed emotionless portrayal as that does match the previous incarnation very well but nothing he could have done would have lived up to our expectations or imaginations after seeing the faceless guy from the other two films. However the little we did see of Blofeld previously we saw he had a full head of hair and wore an immaculate suit-and-tie combo with booming voice which is a far cry from the bald headed, Mao-suit wearing Blofeld here. He’s not the worst version of Blofeld, far from it in fact, but it’s just a case of the payoff not matching the build.

Elsewhere he have the two Bond girls first the ill-fated Aki and then Kissy Suzuki. Aki actually starts off pretty well as a competent agent but her romance with Bond comes from nowhere and she just kisses him out of the blue and ceases to be interesting at that point. However she is likeable and her death does make you feel for her. That makes it five films in a row where one of Bond’s allies dies. Aki does have perhaps the most beautiful car in the series however with the Toyota 2000GT.

Kissy looks good in her white bikini but it’s obvious that she is only in the film because Bond needs to sleep with someone at the end. Yeah there is the whole ludicrous premise of Connery turning Japanese (not in a Vapours way!) and needing a wife as part of his disguise but for me it was just an excuse for Bond to sleep with someone else. This is proved by the rough outline Roald Dahl was given to work with where he explained that he was told Bond needed to sleep with three women; good girl, a henchman, both of whom must die, and then the main girl. Dahl even called it “the Bond girl formula” so you can see how cynical her inclusion was. Also the producers cared so little as to who got which role that they switched Wakabayashi and Hama’s roles around at the last minute due to the latter’s poor English. Also this film’s perception of women is awful with the “In Japan men come first, women come second” being an extreme low-point. Bond saying that Chinese girls taste different than other girls during the opening Hong Kong scene made me annoyed too.

The henchwoman is Helga Brandt, the piranha food favourite I mentioned earlier, and with her scarlet hair and villainous ways she instantly draws comparisons to Thunderball’s Fiona Volpe it does her no favours at all. Volpe had a fierce, driven, playfully cruel personality but again like so many characters in this film Brandt is a cardboard cut-out. She’s not a person she’s but an archetype, a plot point rather than a character. Fiona used sex as a weapon and pretends to be seduced by Bond’s charms but only does so until her men have had time to get to her room and capture James.

I have no problem with Helga wanting to have sex with Bond, he’s a good-looking guy and seeing a woman in these films treat themselves to a spot of self-gratification is cool, but you’re a Spectre agent damn it- do your job! Her arc is all the over the place going from cold confident torturer which gets her information she needs, to faking falling victim to Bond’s-magic-penis trope for sex, but then reveals that she was acting all along and tries to kill 007 in one of the most amusing over-the-top ways ever. But why pretend to Bond that you’d changed your ways for so long when it didn’t benefit you in any way and not just kill him after the sex? Did you just enjoy killing people in preposterous silly ways? If so that’s awesome and I wish we had seen more of that before you turned into fish food.

Speaking of fish food there is the other henchman Hans (Ronald Rich) who seems to have been created in another carefully planned cynical way. I can imagine it now “Okay shall we make another great henchman?” “Nah let’s just copy the three we already have. Helga has red hair so that’s Fiona covered. It was the simply red hair that made Fiona special after all. That just leaves us with Oddjob and Red Grant.” “Okay I have a plan. Red Grant was tall and blonde. Oddjob was super strong and mute. How about if we combined both and had a tall, strong, blonde mute?” “Genius! Now we just need cool death scene for him.” “Or just give him the same as Helga’s.” They even bring back Burt Kwouck from Goldfinger! The Pink Panther’s A Shot in the Dark had already come out at this point so it’s not like we aren’t going to recognise him again. It would have been cool if they said he was the same character from Goldfinger under new employment but sadly not.

The bad script, performances and characters are also sunk by so many absurd moments that make no sense. I mentioned a few in Goldfinger and Thunderball that were also stupid but I was able to overlook them as the rest of the movie around those gaffs were so impressive and enjoyable. By contrast I found myself face-palming so many times at the huge leaps of logic. I was going to compile a long list of my grievances at first but that would require putting more effort into this review than what many put into the movie itself but here are just some;

·         First of all we see Blofeld watching his rocket in space but who the hell is filming this? Does he just hire a camera crew to fly into space and record his rocket and if so why doesn’t that show up on the US radars?

·         Again Bond watches a helicopter pick up a pursuing car with a magnet and then drop it into the sea on a monitor but who is filming that? It’s like they are watching the movie they are in which is the only explanation I can find.

·         Bond carries around a safe-cracking devise. I get that. It makes sense that he may need to use one. Carrying around suction pads just in case you will need to climb onto a metal retractable roof of a hidden volcano base you had no idea was even there. No. I’m not having it

·         Blofeld escapes and nobody bothers to go after him even though it surely should be easy to find one man that is either scaling a mountain or swimming to safety especially when you have a whole army of ninjas at your disposal! Guess when Bond wants to get laid nothing else matters.

·         They spend ages trying to convince people that a tall Scotsman with unmistakeable accent could disguise himself as a Japanese farmer. That is silly, but if that’s what you want to do with your story, fine. But why does his disguise vanish the moment he is captured? What was the point of any of that side plot?

·         What exactly was Bond’s plan when he was entering Blofeld’s rocket? Was he actually going to fly into space? Really Bond? Being a commander is not the same as being an astronaut. You may want to go into space, we all do, but don’t you think one of the astronauts you just freed would be a better option? You didn’t think that you might be more use in the enemy base fighting Blofeld with your licence to kill than a group of cosmonauts? Also didn’t one of the American astronauts get on the rocket? So did Bond just kill him when he exploded the vessel?

·         I’m not too sure I buy the faked death at the start either. It’s implied that the woman he was in bed with was in on staged murder, but if so why didn’t she give him a heads up before flipping the bed? The medic who checked his pulse must have been part of the plan but what about the gunmen? I used to think they were actually trying to kill Bond but maybe the underside of the bed was bullet proof but that doesn’t work as the wall behind Connery had bullet holes, so what gives? How did he survive that then? Also if the gunmen were part of this plan too then why did you have to go to such lengths and not instead just publish the newspaper story and hold a fake funeral? The fact Blofeld works out Bond is alive because he has a Walther PPK is maddening but also renders the whole thing pointless anyway! Oh whatever, here is Nancy Sinatra to take our minds off all that with her wonderful song.

That is exactly why this film is beloved by so many I think. You see even with all the tedious, dull stuff all anybody actually remembers from the film is Nancy Sinatra’s song, Pleasence’s iconic image, the fun Little Nellie scene and that volcano. It often ends up near the top on a lot of critics list but I think that comes from people who haven’t watched it in a while and the fact the “Connery is the best Bond” belief is so wide-spread and repeated so often that it blinds people to the fact that Connery’s tenure wasn’t all hits and he did indeed have some misses. This to me is one of those misses. But by the same token even I can’t overlook what this film does well and that volcano set design by Ken Adams. It’s easy to say “Well if the volcano set wasn’t there You Only Live Twice would suck” but I hate that logic. Yes it kind of is true but the fact is the volcano set is there and it’s wonderful. So we are left with a deeply flawed movie with unforgettable memorable moments. Boring yet iconic.

5/10- A very weak entry in the series elevated by breath-taking sets and an beautiful theme tune that ensures that while the film isn’t very good nobody remembers that. I can’t blame people for only remembering the good stuff either. After all why focus on all the negatives when you can instead bask in the magnificence of that volcano?

Best quote: “Bon appetit.”

Best scene: The first reveal of the volcano lair.

Kick-ass moment: I am going for the short one-take of the ninja laying out six of his fellow trainees and then putting the katana back into the sheaf as quick as lightning. Give that extra a raise!

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow will enter 1968 and we see a Ford Mustang face off against a Dodge Charger on the streets of San Fran-freaking-Cisco! I can not wait. 

The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

The One Armed Swordsman (1967)

Director: Chang Cheh

Starring: Jimmy Wang Yu

One-armed and dangerous.

Fang Kang’s father was a lowly servant, but one who heroically died in battle to protect his master Qi Ru Feng from bandits. For his bravery Feng raised Kang as a son and trained him in martial arts. Qi Ru Feng’s other students and his spoiled daughter Qi Pei-Er, who secretly has feelings for Kang, took umbrage to what they perceived was preferential treatment to the servant’s son before Pei takes the whole ‘Treat them mean; keep them keen’ dating advice way too far and cuts of his freaking arm! Now months later Feng’s temple is under attack by the evil Long-Armed Devil and Kang puts his grievances aside to help his adopted father figure and becomes the one-armed swordsman.

So here is our second Shaw Brothers movie and this is the first time I’ll be talking about a movie from director Chang Cheh and star Jimmy Wang Yu who’ll be cropping up a few more times down the road. Chang Cheh would go on to direct future influential movies such as Five Deadly Venoms and Wang Yu would go on to star in a few more martial arts films where funnily enough he loses his arm again. Careless. But this is where both of them made their name and the one-armed swordsman character made Taiwanese Jimmy Wang Yu a big star in Hong Kong with the movie breaking box office records there.

Like Come Drink with Me the first time I had seen this film was as part of the reviews for this blog and therefore I am watching it with modern eyes and instinctively comparing it to later martial arts films rather than view it in context of when it was made. This is obviously unfair as the choreography, not to mention the budget, in modern movies such as The Protector and The Raid franchise are on a much grander scale. So the best thing to do would be to hold it up against King Hu’s Come Drink with Me and then see how it compares. I enjoyed Hu’s 1966 wuxia movie and gave it 7/10 in my earlier review, but is The One-Armed Swordsman Better? Well yes and no.

My biggest problem with the earlier film was in the editing department with the movie’s constant use of jump cuts which especially marred the climactic battle. I didn’t notice any jarring cuts this time so that was a huge improvement although I still wasn’t too fond of the camerawork if I am honest. Yes there are no jump cuts here that I noticed but there was a shaking camera that made some scenes hard to make out. It’s not the infamous shaky cam that plagues modern cinema or nearly as bad as a Taken film and it was clearly not done on purpose but it’s notable enough to point out. There is one shot for instance at Feng’s temple where we see him and his men sitting around a table and the camera zooms out but as it does so the frame notably drops a few inches before it is raised again. While that mistake is not at a crucial time, and to be honest is quite amusing, some of the ones during the final battles are really bad.

The final battle has real pacing issues for me too. Towards the end Fang battles the bad guy’s brother, and second in command, Smiling Tiger (Tang TI), but just when the fight is about to start we cut away to see a confrontation between the main villain Long Armed Devil (Yeung Chi-hing) and Qi Wu Feng (Tien Feng). Now I don’t have a problem with the confrontation on its own and it had to happen for plot purposes but for the whole time it was going on I was just desperate for the movie to get back to the Kang/Tiger fight. I don’t understand why they didn’t either have that fight before we see Long Armed Devil meet Feng or have that confrontation take place prior to the battle between Kang and Tiger and switch back and forth between both martial arts fight, but what we have here just doesn’t work. I have watched the Smiling Tiger/Kang fight twice now and I am still unsure as to just what happened at the end of it and don’t think it was filmed or edited very well.

 I also found the chorography in the fights was just not that good. Come Drink with Me’s weren’t great either but in that you at least got a few fairly long takes where Golden Swallow got to show off her balletic swordplay. Sadly you never do get anything to write-home about here. I did like the gimmick where the villains have created these swords that have a locking mechanism built in that allows them to trap the blades of their enemies which is pretty cool if a little silly. The bad guys themselves weren’t very interesting with Smiling Tiger and his constant laugh really getting on my nerves. I know the laughing is kind of implied with the name but that doesn’t mean it isn’t any ess annoying. I didn’t like the villain in Come Drink with Me either but I hated him a good way and wanted him to die, whereas here I just didn’t want Tiger on screen. Interestingly there was a character in the earlier movie called Smiling Tiger too and that person was a villain also. Maybe the Chinese just don’t like tigers? Might explain why they are doing their best to kill them off in the name of “medicine”.

The main villain Long-Armed Devil was a bit better than Smiling Tiger actually. Not because of his character, which was still wafer thin, but I liked how many different weapons he had. There is a long whip that presumably lends him his name but if that is chop by a blade he has these javelins attached to his back. If he runs out of those he still has his blade-locking sword and even a dagger too. I really loved the variety and he kind of reminded me of an ancient Chinese Boba Fett with all the gadgets. One thing I didn’t get was that for most of the movie his face is obscured before being revealed in the final act. It builds up a lot of mystery and intrigue making me think that it might be someone we had seen earlier in the movie and it was going to be a big twist, but it was a new character making me wonder why the bothered with the tease. At least when the James Bond pulled that trick with the leader of SPECTRE they had Blofeld have a hideous scar, but here it was nothing and it was very strange.

 I have been quite negative in my review this far but I haven’t even gotten to my least favourite part and that was the romance. After Kang Fang’s arm is cut off he is rescued and cared for by female farmer Xiao Man (Lisa Chaio Chaio). Unsurprisingly the two eventually fall in love and yeah, I don’t buy it. After Kang has been saved we go forwards for an undisclosed length of time and suddenly they are in love. We never see them fall for each other or learn why it just happens. Xaio Man is also such a boring character and while they try and give her depth with a backstory it just doesn’t work aside from the unintentionally hilarious explanation as to why she just to happens possess as book with one-armed sword fighting techniques. She’s also a constant drag with her hatred of martial arts and her nagging Kang about giving them up. Again going back to Come Drink with Me that movie had a main female and male character but didn’t feel the need to have an out of place love story in it which is to that movie’s credit. I get that they wanted the One-Armed Swordsman to leave this life behind at the film’s end and so needed the love interest but they could have gone about it in a much better way or given Xiao more depth.

To make matters worse the film tries to complicate things further by including a love-triangle with Qi-Per Er (Angela Pan) being dragged into the mix. Fang Kang at one point rescues Qi-Per Er from a couple of guys who were seemingly about to rape her and Xiao Man gets jealous of this and it’s unbearable. Qi Per-Er after her rescue then starts trying to seduce Kang and saying she wants him and I was just sitting there staring at the screen like “Bitch please, you cut of his freaking arm!” Yeah she is gorgeous and high-born compared to the plain-Jane lowly famer but come- on you cut of his arm! But she acts like that act wasn’t a big deal and even at the end her father seems angry that Kang doesn’t stay with his martial arts school which again makes me irate at his character. Your daughter chopped his arm off and he still saved her honour and your life you ungrateful cretin! Qi-Per Er even tries to justify what she did because Kang was arrogant. Wow. Even Kill Bill’s Bill would think that was one crazy overreaction.

So what did I like? Well Jimmy Wang Yu himself. I thought he was perfectly cast for this role. His eyes are just so full of intensity and rage and he’s totally believable. He also has that Clint Eastwood quality to him where he can convey a lot of emotion without saying anything. His character was very enjoyable too and while he was a tad under the thumb of his controlling girlfriend I liked him always choosing to do the right thing despite what she suggested. As cheesy as it was I also loved that his father’s broken sword he kept in remembrance of him turns out to be the perfect sized weapon for one-armed swordplay. There were some awesome moments too such as when one of the would be rapists, who had mocked his disability earlier, comes at him with a knife and Kang chops his hand off and the blade flies through the air impaling itself on a post with the severed hand still clenched around it. There was also a moment where several guys are coming at him and he just sits down to drink his wine while fighting them off. There was quite some competition to the kick-ass moment in this movie and as this is sort of an origin story I am tempted to review the sequel which I imagine can now just jump straight into some awesome action scenes.

One thing I did not think I would be complementing before watching this film would be how beautiful the scene where he loses his arm is, but no, it really was quite stunning. Yes it was ridiculous how little blood there was, and the restraint really surprised me, but chosen to film a scene which could have been horrific in a forest with falling snow turned such an act of barbarity into something quite poetic. I also suspect Kill Bill’s swordfight between Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu owes something to this. Of course having such a stunning scene so early on does make me wish that the rest of the film looked as nice or that the other sets had as much imagination put into them as this one did. But if they wanted one scene to stand out the most, they sure chose the right one. Come Drink with Me’s best looking scene was the confrontation at the monastery and relative to the plot it wasn’t an especially important one so kudos to Chang Cheh for making the most essential scene in this film, the moment where Kang becomes the One-Armed Swordsman, so memorable.

If I sounded overly negative when talking about the One-Armed Swordsman then that’s a shame as despite all my complaints it’s a good film. It’s just that this had all the potential to be an incredible movie. I’ll give it the same score as Come Drink with Me but I think I slightly prefered the earlier movie.

7/10- A highly influential martial arts movie that largely still holds up today.

Best quote: “Don’t you know I’ve always loved you?” “Loved me? You always did your best to torture me! You cut off my arm!” “Only because you were cold and arrogant.” Wow. Just wow.

Best scene: Our hero loses his arm in the falling snow.

Kick-ass moment: Fang Kang catches a thrown dart in his teeth!

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we go from a snowy forest in Hong Kong to a Japanese volcano, where we at last get to see the face of a certain white feline enthusiast.

Point Blank (1967)

Point Blank (1967)

Director: John Boorman

Starring: Lee Marvin

There are two kinds of people in his uptight world: His victims and his women. And sometimes you can’t tell them apart.

After being betrayed during a robbery Walker wants revenge, but most of all he just wants his money.

Point Blank stars Lee Marvin who – BANG! BANG! – Holy crap, Lee Marvin was just shot! Oh wait, no he’s not, they were just showing two other people being shot during the robbery rather than – BANG! My bad, that was him getting shot after all! Point Blank starts in breathless fashion with Marvin’s character Walker (his first name never is revealed) being shot and then we quickly go forwards and backwards in time showing how he came to be recruited for the job and what led him to receiving a bullet when he is betrayed by his friend Mal Reese (John Vernan) who takes not only Walker’s share of the money but also his wife Lynne (Sharon Acker). As far as movie openings go the start to John Boorman’s Point Blank makes quite the first impression. Your confused mind might initially think that Walker was just killed, as he wonders to himself “How did I get her?”, and that you are about to be shown the events that lead to his demise with him talking us through them with a posthumous narration ala’ American Beauty, or Sunset Boulevard for you movie buffs, or Desperate Housewives for you lovers of trashy American TV (like me!)

But fear not as Walker is alive and well. Or is he? A weird question it would seem as the rest of the film shows Lee Marvin on his journey of revenge and to reclaim the stolen money that was stolen from him (he stole that money fair and square!). However the movie has an almost dream-like state to it with the constant brief flashbacks throughout as if we are watching a dying man’s life flash before his eyes, or a wish fulfilment fantasy of a man about to meet his maker. I mean the guy is shot at *ahem* point blank and left for dead at the now recently closed Alcatraz prison where the robbery took place. It seems unlikely that someone could survive that and even if he did he would still have to swim back to shore, something, we are told in the next scene by a tour guide, has never been done even by the few that did escape the prison. The flashbacks are usually only a second long on average but the scattered timeframe, even if most of the film is in order, could be interpreted as being the last thoughts of Walker as in real life most people’s thoughts are never linear. I am not saying the movie is that, it just be a straight up revenge plot and you could simply watch it that way and enjoy it, but it is a movie that makes you think about it afterwards.

Even if all of this film is happening there are rumours that Marvin’s character could be a ghost. After all fans of the film will point out the surprising fact that despite the movie’s death count Walker himself doesn’t actually kill anybody. Yes Mal falls from the roof of his hotel (in a very poor effect- the worst part of the film for me) but that was an accident and Reece fell off the roof more so than him being pushed. Maybe Walker’s ghost simply scared him to death? Scaring people to death would make sense with what happens to his Walker’s wife. Also at the movie’s end when *SPOILER ALERT* Yost (Keenan Wynn) leaves the $93,000 out for Walker to collect, Walker never takes it. So maybe he was never really there and Yost simply left the money out to rid himself of Walker’s evil spirit and not befall the same fate as the rest Marvin’s victims?

I have suspicions myself about the mysterious character of Yost. We first see him in the earlier mentioned scene with the tour guide giving us the history of Alcatraz but we are given no context to how he knows Walker and he always seems to reappear whenever Walker really needs information of the mysterious organisation that have his money. Until the end he’s like Walker’s figurative guardian angel who actually reminded me a little of It’s a Wonderful Life’s literal guardian angel Clarence Odbody. Maybe Walker is alive but Yost is simply a figment of his imagination. Wait, that doesn’t really work, because Yost seems real enough at the end… Maybe I need to stop overthinking everything and get some sleep.

Even if you don’t buy into the whole ‘Walker is dead’ theory, and I don’t think I really do myself, there is still lots to enjoy here with my favourite aspect of the film being the cinematography and editing. This is a really beautifully made movie and it didn’t have to be. It could have just been your run-of-the-mill revenge thriller, and I am sure I will be reviewing some of them as we continue on through the years, but instead this is quite the work of art. I know I said The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was a work of art too, and I came close to saying that about Le Samourai, and I am going not to try and overuse that phrase but it does apply here. There are three moments that really made me want to applaud the film. The first was when Walker arrives at the airport on his way to (shall we say greet?) his backstabbing ex-wife and Mal who are now lovers. We see Walker walking through the airport with the volume of his footsteps on the marbled floor being turned way up before the camera cuts back and forth between Lynne at her apartment and Walker getting ever closer to her with the sound of the footsteps continuing throughout all the shots. The constant rhythm of Walker’s walk is like that of a marching band or, even more apt, a war drum as he closes in on his enemies ready for battle.

The second little trick I adored was when, in a fabulous scene, Lynne is telling Walker that she did once love him, recalls when he introduced her to Mal and reminisces of the times when  the three of them were happy before she sadly ends with how she slowly grew feelings for Walker’s best friend. The scene was supposed to have Lee Marvin’s character ask her questions back and forth to find out why she betrayed him, but according to Boorman Lee didn’t say his next line so Sharon Acker just continued on with the answers without him saying a word. Marvin brought a lot of his own ideas to the role and this was an inspired one as the scene plays out so wonderfully with Lynne guiltily figuratively writing her own confession. What I really loved about the whole scene however was a flashback we see of the three of them in happier times riding in the front of a car. Lynne playfully takes Walker’s sunglasses off his face, tries them on herself, before perhaps symbolically putting them on Reece. We hear her explain to Marvin “I just drifted towards Mal” and the camera literally drifts slightly to the right, cropping Walker out of the picture altogether. It’s so well done.

My third favourite artistic touch occurs later when Walker meets Lynne’s sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Mal it turns out had left Lynne for her sister Chris and although it’s implied they hooked up she claims he makes her skin crawl. Chris then helps Walker take down Mal and the two of them in up in bed together. Chris rolls on top of Walker but we get a jump cut flashback with Lynne rolling on top of Walker from when they were married. Walker in turn rolls on top of Lynne but another jump cut replaces him with Mal showing us a moment during their affair. We then see Chris replace Lynne before Mal is replaced by Walker in similar jump cuts until we get back to our present day couple. It was a superbly done sequence reminding us of the tangle web these four characters have woven. It also adds to the “Is this really happening?” undercurrent. Plus it finally uses jump cuts effectively rather than the editing short cuts I discussed in the Bond movies and Come Drink with Me.

Director John Boorman would later go on to have a very successful, if not that prolific, career and he’s still going having released his latest movie in 2014 at the age of 81. However this was just his second movie and the new director had to fight for the film to remain in his vision. It all started when he met Lee Marvin on the set of The Dirty Dozen (a movie I concluded is not really eligible for this action blog) and presented him with a script based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E Westlake. Neither Marvin nor Boorman liked the script but both were fascinated by the character of Walker. Marvin agreed to the role, tossed aside the script, and called a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his agent and Boorman. Marvin used his star power to ask the studio heads and producers as to whether he had script approval and they said he did. Marvin then asked if he had approval of the principle cast and again they said yes. He then replied that he deferred all decisions to Boorman and left the meeting selflessly giving the new director all the power.

Even with Lee Marvin giving him complete control over the film the executives were said to be perplexed when they saw the final cut of the movie and were talking about reshoots. Perhaps they didn’t like the use of flashbacks or couldn’t see the artistry at hand here but it didn’t matter as legendary editor Margaret Booth, who had just been nominated for an Oscar for editing for 1965’s Mutiny on the Bounty, firmly reassured Boorman by saying “You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!” Neither Boorman nor the executives changed anything.

Lee Marvin is an actor I am well aware of but I am not sure why as besides The Dirty Dozen, which I saw when I was very young and can’t remember anything about, I don’t think I have ever seen him in anything. He was magnificent here with his steely, cold-blooded determination. Usually in movies when a character is out for revenge and wants to kill someone they first stop to speak to the person they’ve tracked down in an Indigo Montoya fashion, but not here. Don’t get me wrong the “My name is Indigo Montoya. You killed my Father. Prepare to die” was such a rewarding moment as in The Princess Bride we needed Montoya to let his six fingered fiend know exactly why he was going to die and the pay-off worked, but usually the hero, who has been on a quest thinking of nothing but vengeance, at the point he could get revenge stops for a one-liner or for a quick conversation first and it takes me out of it.

With Point Blank we know why Walker wants revenge, Mal knows too, but even so I was still stunned when Marvin bursts into his house and shoots Reece’s bed without even having time to check if he is in it first. Such vicious tunnel-versioned awesomeness. Of course the next time he sees Mal he doesn’t kill him on sight which is a shame, but by that point he’s also aiming to get back his money too and needs information so I’ll let him off even if it does kind of go against the previous scene and his earlier characterisation in way. I also found Marvin’s bafflement about everyone saying they can’t pay him to be so amusing. He says “Well somebody has to pay” in such a low-key way as if he were returning a faulty product to a store in exchange for a refund rather than asking for $93,000. Also the fight in the middle of this movie was nearly as good as the one in From Russia with Love and Walker fighting dirty (he punched a guy in the balls!) fitted his no-nonsense character down to a tee. I’ll be talking about another Lee Marvin movie much later on my blog, but I doubt that will be anywhere close to being this good.

I am a little nervous about watching some of the 1970’s action movies as there are a lot I have never seen before and I have this pre-conceived notion that a ton of them are going to be grim, gritty, humourless violent films and I thought Point Blank was going to be the first one of that ilk I’d review in this blog. In lesser hands this film would be just that, not that those style of movies are aall bad and they will make a change from the Bonds that are going to get sillier and sillir as we go on, but Boorman’s and Marvin’s wonderful ideas and foresight help turn what could have just been a standard revenge film into a beautifully little gem of a movie. Lastly I have to say how amazing it is that they shoot on location with the first scenes taken place actually at Alcatraz. It was filmed at the prison just three years after the it closed and was the first ever movie to be shot there. It will not be the last time we talk about Alcatraz on my blog.

9/10- A revenge action movie with brains and style.

Best quote: I am going to go with this whole conversation because the first line which was delivered in such a camp way was hilarious, not least because it was a huge understatement and the final delivery with Walker stating that everything really is as it seems was amazing.

“You’re a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man! Why do you run around doing things like this?”

“I want my money. I want my $93,000.”

“$93,000? You threaten a financial structure like this for $93,000? No, Walker, I don’t believe you. What do you really want?”

“I - I really want my money.”

Best scene: Walker marching through the airport with his footsteps echoing that of a war drum.

Kick-ass moment: No-nonsense Walker, bursting into his wife’s house, restraining her, and shooting the bed without even having time to check if his intended target was there. This guy is not to be fucked with.

Next time on a Bloody Tomorrow we go back to Hong Kong for the uplifting story of a man who comes with the disability of losing an arm by.... Well, by killing a lot of people. 

Le Samourai (1967)

Le Samourai (1967)

Director: Jean-Pierre Melville

Starring: Alain Delon

Things suddenly go badly for a successful French assassin

Hitman Frank Costello is called in by the police for questioning over his most recent assassination. Costello has a water-tight alibi and the authorities reluctantly let him go but Frank’s employers are nervous after his close call with the police and Costello finds himself on the run from both the law who want him arrested and his employers who want him dead.

Low on action but dripping in style comes this highly influential movie from famed French new-wave director Jean-Pierre Melville. You can see the influence this movie, with its hitman character, had on the future movies of Luc Besson and John Woo with the similarities between Le Samourai and Woo’s ‘The Killer’ being very obvious. Both movies feature an assassin called Jeff who after completing their assignment are pursued by both the criminals who hired them and the police investigating the murder. However despite the same basic premise the movies couldn’t feel further apart in how they approach the premise. The Killer is one of my favourite action flicks and was the film that introduced me to not only Hong Kong cinema but foreign language movies in general. That said I loved Le Samourai for what it does differently to the Killer. Woo’s movie is a high-octane action movie with shoot-outs and car chases whereas this is an understated thriller where the gun battles are over in seconds and the chases are on-foot in the underground metro. The Killer is, like all of Woo’s films really, about love, friendship and bonding between men whilst Le Samourai focuses the loneliness of its main character.

In Woo’s movie and other hitman films like Leon we usually begin with an assassination and an exciting action set piece but here we instead see Frank Costello (Alain Delon) the evening of the hit carefully plan out everything to ensure he will get away with the crime. We see Jeff steal a car with the aid of a giant keyring containing keys that fit all different makes and models and we stay with him inside the car until one eventually starts the engine (nobody in 1967’s Paris locks their cars when they exit it seems). Costello takes the stolen vehicle to a Grand Theft Auto style garage where it is fitted up with new number plates and he is handed a gun in exchange for cash. Jeff next perfectly plans his alibi with help from his fiancé/girlfriend/mistress Jane and unwitting help from the other man she’s sleeping with. Then it’s time for the assassination and it happens in a club whilst a female lounge singer is crooning away, in another moment that Woo paid homage too.

In my previous review of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly I paid compliments to director Sergio Leone for his courage to have the opening ten minutes play out without dialogue and here, one year later, Le Samourai nearly goes the same length of time before a word is uttered. The following five minutes where the actual hit happens and Jeff finishes off the final touches to his alibi, by letting the man sleeping with Jane spot him leaving her apartment, are almost played it in silence too and all fifteen minutes are completely gripping. I do find it interesting that my favourite scenes in most of the movies I have reviewed thus far aside from the 007 films have been the ones without dialogue. From the Dollars trilogy’s silent gun duels to the Crop-duster scene in North by Northwest and even in James Bond’s first movie my favourite part was him quietly checking his hotel room for bugs and laying traps around it so he’d know if anybody was snooping on him. Maybe I should watch more silent movies.

Jeff’s carefully planned out crime is almost undone by the fact he was spotted by a few people in the club and so the police drag in lots of people that matched the description given of Costello, or more accurately, anybody wearing his trench coat and hat combo. This being 1960’s Paris everybody is well dressed and seemingly all wear clothes similar to Jeff, yet despite this the police chief (Francois Perier) has a hunch that our protagonist might be the man he is looking for. We then see all the fruits of Jeff’s careful planning come to fruition as the chief tries and fails to find a crack in Costello’s alibi. However Jeff’s story holds up as his lover’s lover says he saw Costello leaving Jane’s flat and it all pays off. The police chief trying to unravel Costello’s fabricated story of his whereabouts during the murder and Costello’s water-tight lie play out in a superbly tense Hitchcockian way with Jeff’s perfect assassination reminding me of the almost perfect killing in Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder.

The first half of this movie was the part that I enjoyed most but that’s not to say the rest of the film isn’t good, it is, it is for me however just a little less memorable than the first, it just doesn’t quite have tension I felt of the hit or Jeff trying to avoid being identified as the culprit. There is one scene that I really enjoyed in the latter half however and it is when two policemen break into Costello’s flat and plant a bug causing much distress to Jeff’s caged pet bullfinch. Costello then arrives back home and thinks everything is fine until he sees his pet has lost lots of his feathers and correctly figures out someone must have been in the flat and scared his pet. It’s a really fun scene, and yet another silent one, and really made me love that bird. Indeed the part of the film I was most emotionally involved with was not when Jeff has to say good-bye to his partner Jane, played by Delon’s real-life wife Nathalie Delon, but when he knowingly left his flat for the final time and paused briefly to say farewell to his loyal bullfinch. I do wonder if Jeff’s main companion being a bird was another influence on Luc Besson making Leon’s best friend a plant.

One thing I really enjoyed about Le Samourai is that nothing is ever overly explained to you. The relationship between Jeff and Jane is never clearly defined, we never get details on Jeff’s past and we never find out why Costello’s employers want him to carry out the assassination. Unlike the man John Woo’s Jeff kills at the start of The Killer who it turns out was a bit of a criminal himself, which makes us not turn against our hero, we learn nothing about the man killed in this film and don’t know if he was a good man or not.

The club singer and pianist Valarie, played by Cathy Rosier, remains a real enigma too. She sees Jeff just after he has completed his hit, but she does not identify him to the police. Jeff deduces that she is working for his employers and thus she doesn’t want him, and secondly them, caught which is why she stays mum. This is supported by the fact she is later seen in the same house of Costello’s employer, but if that’s the case then do they want Jeff to kill her too? I guess they could be tying up loose ends, in which case why assign her to the club in the first place? I suppose she was there to make sure Costello carried out the hit and if she wasn’t there someone else would be and that person might be more likely to give him over to the police? Maybe she was a lover of Costello’s employer but was having an affair with the deceased man and her jealous boyfriend wanted them both dead? I may need to watch again to see if the clues are there, but honestly I think I would rather it remain ambiguous. For what it’s worth unless I am forgetting someone in an earlier movie Cathy Rosier is the first woman of colour to have a major role in one of the movies I have covered so far and her character had nothing to do with her being black either. Well done 1960’s France!

Nathalie Delon, who plays Jane, interestingly dated both Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton after they divorced from Elizabeth Taylor (I don’t know after which divorce from Taylor it was for Burton!) and she was equally if not more beautiful than Taylor and her and Alain must have been one of the most attractive couples in cinema! Here in her first movie did well in her few scenes but husband Alain was the main story and was completely captivating as the tortured despaired hitman. The movie starts with a fake, but realistically sounding quote, from the Bushido code: ‘There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle… perhaps’ and you can see the solitude in Alain’s performance. He really is an empty shell of a man. I sort of get the impression that Jeff might have just been using Jane to try and feel something, anything, to elevate his sense of loneliness and don’t think she meant as much to him as he does to her. His apartment besides the bullfinch only contains cigarette boxes and bottles of mineral water. They say home is whether you lay your hat, but he’s flat looks anything but homely. The Bushido quote is also incredibly relevant to the plot as while I don’t know much about samurais, another reason why I should have started these reviews with Akira Kurosawa’s movies, I understand that if a samurai fails to protect their master they must commit seppuku and while the fate of both Jeff and his master is slightly different the parallels are obvious. Another fun titbit I like is that a samurai who fails to protect his master is known as a Ronin and Leon’s hitman Jean Reno, that movie’s “Le Samouari” would later star in a movie called Ronin, which we’ll get to talk about much later.

If the love-life of Nathalie Delon was interesting and the Samurai/Ronin Jean Reno connection was fun the most shocking thing I found out upon researching this movie was a case of life imitating art with Alain Delon. This movie, set in Paris, which stared Alain as he played a hitman taking assignments from gangsters was released in October 1967 and in October the very next year Delon’s bodyguard Stevan Markovic’s body was found dead in a dump on the outskirts of Paris and Alain himself, along with his real-life gangster friend Francois Marcantoni, were suspects in the murder. Like Jeff Costello Alain Delon was investigated but ultimately not charged. Marcantoni actually was charged, but was later released after questioning. Why were Marcantoni and Alain suspects? Well shortly before he murdered Markovic had written a letter to his brother which read “If I get killed, it’s 100% fault of Alain Delon and his Godfather Marcantoni.”

Markovic was a well-renowned gambler was also famous for throwing lavish high-class parties with Delon and at the parties he allegedly secretly installed cameras around the house, most notably in the bedroom, and would take incriminating photos to later use for blackmail. It was said that several people had a potential motive for wanting Markovic dead with one of the most enduring rumours being that of future French President Georges Pompidou who’s wife legend has it, was one of the people Markovic has secretly captured on film. The photos were real and later found in Markovic’s car but whether they were of Madame Pompidou or a prostitute who bore her likeness as Goerges, who was running for presidency whilst this allegation came to light, claimed is unclear. Like the opening hit in this movie the motive behind Markovic’s murder remains a mystery as the killing was never solved, but its parallels to Le Samourai are startling and it should be said that Delon had communicated with several other known gangsters who also met violent ends after meeting him. Either way the real life murder is as much an enigma as the one that opens this, very great, film.

9/10- A brilliantly cool French piece of cinema that manages to be arty without being pretentious.

Best quote: “Nothing to say?” “Not with a gun on me.” “Is that principle?” “A habit.”

Best scene: It has to be the one in the club where the assassination takes place. It’s not only suspenseful but also features great camera work like the take where we see Jeff’s face peering through an ajar door, the camera panning round to follow four guests arriving guests and following them before it pauses on Valarie playing the piano.

Kick-ass moment: Jeff working out his apartment is probably bugged by his bullfinch’s lack of feathers.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we go from French new-wave to American neo-noir as Lee Marvin is out for revenge.

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966)

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (1966)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach

For three men the civil war wasn’t hell. It was practice!

Three men travel across America in a blaze of gunfire to track down a dead mans buried fortune, crossing and double-crossing each other along the way.

So we’ll back for the final part of the Dollars trilogy and to talk about one of the most revered and beloved movies of all time. Where does one even begin when reviewing this film? I said in my write-up of Come Drink with Me how much I struggle writing reviews of classics movies that while I appreciate for their importance I don’t quite enjoy as much as other people. Doing a retrospective review of a legendary movie that everybody knows is incredible is even harder. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is obviously one of the best movies of all time. I was tempted to end the review there. The very title of the movie has become part of everyday vernacular and you can find hundreds of examples online where it is used in articles and essays that have nothing to do with the movie it came from. It’s currently #9 on IMDB’s Top 250 and interestingly is the highest movie on the list that wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar. That last part is crazy and shows how underappreciated this movie was back in 1966.

I honestly don’t know how anybody could watch this film and not be in awe of it, but despite making two fantastic movies in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More Sergio Leone’s films and those of his contemporaries in the genre were still looked down upon by the snooty critics of its day. This, the final part of his Dollars trilogy, were written off as “just a spaghetti western” and therefore not taken seriously as an art form. In some ways it is reminiscent of critics today who don’t think Videogames can be art and deride them as “just videogames” clearly never having played games like Okami, Shadow of a Colossus or Journey. Famed critic Roger Ebert when talking about this film years later said he had initially written a review of a four star movie (his top mark) but only given it three stars due to him dismissing it as a lesser film simply because of its genre again in the same way that some people today view animated movies as “just for kids” when at their best they are so much more.

I have marvelled in my two previous films about Leone’s direction and he is just getting better, braver and more confident with every passing movie. I mentioned in my Fistful review how Leone liked to tell a story visually rather than with unnecessary dialogue and here he has the gal and confidence to have the first ten minutes of the film go by without a single word being uttered. When I first noticed that the movie had been going on a while without anyone speaking rather than being frustrated or bored I wanted to see how long he could go without dialogue! It is like when you watch a good long tracking shot. At first you don’t pay it much attention but then you suddenly realise that the camera has not cut in a while (or in this case nobody speaking) and are awestruck by how good it is. Of course he is not just famous as a director for his visual storytelling but also because of his wide shots and clos-ups. I just love the start to this film as in the very first shot we get a gorgeous wide shot of the distant scenery which suddenly changes to an extreme close-up as a character steps into vision. It’s Leone’s two trademark shots in one quick take identifying this as one of his movies right from the get-go.

While the opening of this film is great, it is of course the ending that elevated the movie to its legendary status with the iconic three way gun duel, or a truel as it is now known. Thousands of words have been written about the battle between Clint Eastwood’s Blondie (the Good), Lee Van Cleef’s Angel Eyes (the Bad) and Eli Wallach’s Tuco (the Ugly) which serves as the movie’s climactic pay-off and it is truly one of the greatest scenes in history and along with the crop-duster attack from North by Northwest the best scene in any of the films I have reviewed so far. It also represents Leone’s talent as a visual storyteller more-so than any other moment in all three of the films in his trilogy as again it is completely silent. From the moment we get a crash zoom of the rock that Blondie puts on the ground, supposedly with the name of the grave where the money is buried written on it, which begins Morricone’s tense score, we get two and a half minutes without ant talking where our three protagonists walk into position for the duel. Then we get two and a half more minutes of the men starring down one another before the first gun is fired and it’s a minute after that before somebody speaks again, making it seven dialogue-free minutes overall. Under any other director that could seem like self-indulgent and pretentious but Leone was gifted, not just with his own talent, but with an exceptional crew too.

The movie’s composer, as it was for all of the Dollars movies, was Ennio Morricone and his work on this movie is possibly the best work of his career, which I don’t say lightly as Morricone is to many people one of the greatest movie composers of all time. The title theme is of course insanely famous and is one of the most recognisable pieces of music from a film. Even people who have never seen the movie have likely heard it. I was recently on a road trip leaving Sydney with some friends and riding shotgun, which meant being the car’s DJ, and we came across a small old fashioned town not unlike one you would see in a Leone flick and I played The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme as we slowly drove through and everyone found it hilarious even though I am sure most had no idea what film it was from. It’s just become the unofficial theme for the western genre overall. The main theme was based on a hyena’s cry and it has a slightly different tone to it depending on which of the three characters is on-screen, which is something I loved with Angel Eyes getting a low menacing version while the Ugly’s is screeched at a higher pitch.

I adore the main theme, but what Morricone composed for the duel itself was on a whole other level. The music almost reaches a crescendo as the three men take position and the music cuts out completely and all we can hear are birds. Then we a slow chiming jingle plays from Morricone, not unlike the haunting ’30 Seconds to What?’ pocket watch tune in For a Few Dollars More, and slowly the music then gets more and more intense as it gets closer to the true climax. It’s just wonderful. I have sang Leone and Morricone’s praises for all three of their movies but I haven’t really complimented the editing of these films before. I have been very critical of editing in a lot of these 60’s movies as it’s very easy to blame all the mistakes you see on screen as being the editor’s fault but for his third spaghetti western Leone brought in Nino Baragli.

Baragli co-edited the movie officially, but he seems to be the one given all the credit for the fabulously edited finale. There’s a superb video online by Max Tohline (which you can find here) detailing all the edits of the truel and going into it in more detail than I will, but I will briefly say that the way Nino starts with the wide angle and setting the geography of the scene is perfect. With the position of all three men clear the editing begins switching between shots of the character’s faces to over the shoulder angles of one of them looking at another and then as the music gets faster so too does his editing and we see extreme close-ups of the faces of our titular characters, their guns and ultimately just their eyes with each cut coming quicker, ratcheting up the tension perfectly in sync with Morricone’s score. Then once the gun is fired we go right back to the first establishing shot showing who shot where. It’s exemplary editing and shows you don’t need a shaking camera to artificially create drama or excitement. Also the way he tells a story with his close-ups is magnificent too. The edits directly follow the eye-line of the characters so for instance we see The Bad looking right to the Ugly so the camera cuts to Tuco, then with Tuco looking to his left we go back to Angel Eyes who’s eyes then roll to his left and we are shown Blondie. It’s all so well done and further establishes who is in what position. You can also perfectly read the expressions of the actors too and I found myself really feel empathy for Lee Van Cleef’s The Bad character as he seems to know the other two are going to team up on him and that this is his final stand.

Angel Eyes also gets the most close-ups during the tense stand-off too as well as the most close-ups of his hand crawling towards his gun as he knows he will have to act first if he is to come out of this alive. I feel like Lee Van Cleef getting the most screen time during the final shoot out was deliberately done as his character had by far the least amount of screen time of the three prior to this and to make us try and get into what he was thinking at that crucial time. Clint Eastwood, as the Man Who Really Always Has a Name, gets more screen time than Van Cleef but he still doesn’t get any background to his character and keeps his air of mystery. We are shown however that he is not without feelings as he seems at a loss for how many young men were killed during the war and we see him console a dying shoulder and letting him have a peaceful final puff on his cigar before the man passes. He also keeps the dying man warm by taken off his coat and placing it on the dying soldier. Yes, Eastwood’s coat. You see The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a prequel of sorts and for two and a half hours Clint Eastwood is wearing a white duster, which doesn’t look quite right, and it’s only after removing it to keep the soldier warm does he then pick up his famous poncho from the ground and we finally get our Man with No Name in his full iconic look. Such fantastic restraint from Leone there as was his choice to not take a side in the war and paint the pro-slavery Confederacy as generic bad guys and instead opting to show that the real villain of war is war itself.

I do kind of wish we got some more character on either Angel Eyes or Blondie however as For a Few Dollars More improved on A Fistful of Dollars by giving background on two of the main three characters, but here we are back down to one. I especially wish there was an extra scene showing the adventures of Lee Van Cleef’s journey to the graveyard where the final battle takes places as he was almost absent from the last hour of this film. I said in my review of the second of the trilogy that it felt like Lee Van Cleef was the star of that movie and that Eastwood was kind of just there for the ride, well here both of them had the film stolen from them, ironically by the film’s thief Tuco.

All three leads were superb but Wallach brings the heart and emotion of the film not only gets the most screen-time of the three but he is the only one who gets any backstory too. At one point we see him meet his priest Brother and see the path he could have gone down had things worked out better for him. The scene with his brother is crucial too as prior to that Tuco was pretty much being despicable to Eastwood by making him walk for days in the hot sun without any water and then preparing to kill him when his dehydration become too much of a burden, but it’s after that scene that we start to root for this loveable rogue especially when Angel Eyes, a character far worse and one that shoots a kid (damn!) re-enters the fray. Eli Wallach is also responsible for two of the movies best moments, both of which were improvised. First, in a scene that reminds me of one in The Terminator, Tuco goes to buy a gun and after spending ages listening to the firing mechanisms of them and getting used to the feel of each one uses his chosen firearm to rob the seller. Wallach knew nothing about guns so Leone’s direction for the scene was just for him to go into the shop and do whatever he wanted so the whole moment when he puts the ‘closed’ sign in the guy’s mouth wasn’t scripted.

The other great improvised moment was when his character is in a bathtub and a bounty hunter bursts in and says he’s been waiting eight moves for the chance to kill him. Sadly for that guy Tuco was clever enough to have a gun concealed under the bubbles and so he shoots the guy dead before Wallach unscripted mockingly says “If you got to shoot, shoot, don’t talk!” which made Leone and the rest of the crew roar with laughter so it was kept in. Like the scene in the gun shop reminds me of The Terminator Tuco’s quip to his foe recalls a future one in Die Hard and I could imagine the bounty hunter replying with John McClane’s “Thanks for the advice!” were he not dead. It is amusing to me that for someone who used dialogue as little as possible The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has a lot of really funny lines especially from Tuco and his frequent “There are two kinds of people…” taunts gets a great pay-off at the end.

Getting back to the editing again briefly although I have spoken about the much imitated three way duel perhaps my favourite shot of the film is when Tuco finally discovers the graveyard and we see just how huge it is with hundreds of graves. Wallach runs around as fast as he can desperately searching for the correct resting place of the hidden money, Morricone’s epic music plays, and the sensational editing which follows Tuco and like him gets ever increasingly desperate until the camera shot literally turns into a blur as it tries to keep up until coming to a sudden stop as we see the grave he’s been looking for. It’s pure cinema magic. It’s impressive enough to watch it without knowing any of the movie’s background but if you read about it you will learn that the graves were all built by the crew which must have taken forever to do as there are hundreds it looks like! The crew also had to rebuild the bridge that Tuco and Blondie blew up as the first time it happened the cameras weren’t rolling!

So far I have done nothing but gush over this film, but is it perfect? No. For starters Leone’s insistence on recording the film silent and then having the actors dub their lines is quite annoying here in his most talky of the trilogy as nobody, not even the American actors, have their mouths match their words and it does distract me a fair bit. I also found myself wondering at one point how the three main characters all knew each other as it wasn’t explained. You might explain that with “Well it’s possible that all three gun-slingers would be well aware of one another” and while I could justify that I can’t rationalise how Angel Eyes all of a sudden became a sergeant in the American army.

Those are nit-picks however and the only other problem I could imagine someone having is with the three hour running time. There are moments when I think “Do we really need that?” such as the whole scene with the bridge but I would hate to have that explosion omitted and actually feel that the length of the movie really helps draw us in to the final showdown as we’ve seen what these three men have all been through to get where they are now and you want to see Tuco and/or Blondie get the money they’ve been searching for. Lastly one thing I haven’t really touched on is the changing of allegiances and the constant shift in power that happens with the three leads which always keep you guessing as to what will happen next. So that just leaves me to mark the movie out of ten.

10/10- I said that this isn’t a perfect movie but it’s close enough to get the full mark. Its scope, its ambition, its drama, its excitement and its downright brilliance is more than enough to give it a ten. If you haven’t seen this for some reason you are cheating yourself from a enjoying a movie that is not only a spaghetti western masterpiece but really is, despite what critics of the day may have thought, a genuine of work of art.

Best quote: “You see in this world there are two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.”

Best scene: It is obviously the graveyard scene, from Tuco’s search for the grave to the movie’s closing famous final line “You’re a stupid son of a ….” which is cut off by the theme tune as Eastwood’s Man with No Name rides off into the distance in a beautiful swansong.

Kick-ass moment: Clint Eastwood lights the fuse of a canon with his cigar.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we just talked about an Italian movie filmed in Spain and we are sticking with Europe to talk about a French movie that inspired a lot of movies including a famous Hong Kong director.