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.

Come Drink with Me (1966)

Come Drink with Me (1966)

Director: King Hu

Starring: Cheng-Pei-pei

One swallow may not make a summer, but a Golden Swallow will make bad guys fall before her.

A gang of criminals kidnap a general’s son in hopes of exchanging his life for that of their leader, but they didn’t count on the general’s other child staging a daring rescue mission. Who is this brave soldier? Well her name is Golden Swallow.

Reviewing a classic old movie is always hard. While some of the great old films seem as fresh and vibrant today as they did when they were made such as the timeless Casablanca, Psycho and Some Like it Hot others seem dated and that can especially be in the action genre where stunt work and fight cerography became so improved throughout the decades. The reason I decided to start my reviews from North by Northwest’s release in 1959 and review them chronologically was so I could see the big milestone movies such as the birth of the kung-fu flick, the first of John Woo’s Heroic Bloodshed films, Die Hard and all of its many clones and Terminator 2’s introduction of CGI in the context of what came before and so I could evaluate what a films impact would have been at the time it came out. Come Drink with Me is without question one such important milestone, however it is sadly one that is dated more than a little.

Coming from legendary producers of martial arts movies The Shaw Brothers and equally important director King Hu Come Drink with Me was the first great wuxia movie and forever changed Hong Kong cinema. Its influence can be seen in so many future movies within the same genre perhaps most obviously in Ang Lee’s famous Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. There is a scene in Drink with Me where a group of thugs surround our hero in an inn, underestimating her, before being quickly humiliated and beaten. The Inn scene has become a bit of a staple in martial arts movies since this film including a memorable moment where Zhang Ziyi fights several guys in an inn in Crouching Tiger. That masterpiece from 2000 even had Come Drink with Me’s leading lady Cheng Pei-pei play Dragon’s villain Jade Fox too in a lovely touch too.

Come Drink with Me is a really good film but it is hurt by some technical problems such as our old enemy the jump cut and it made the final fight between the Drunken Cat (Yueh Hua) and the Abbot (Yeung Chi-hing) almost unwatchable to me. It’s not just the end fight either, but they happen all movie long and they always look just as awful as the ones in Dr No did. Secondly perhaps it was just my version but there seemed to be times when we get a close-up of somebody but the camera seems slightly out of focus. I don’t know what was going on there. It is slightly more forgivable in this compared than say compared to the end of Thunderball which had the one-two punch of a horrid jump cut and awful rear-screen projection as I imagine the budget for this movie would be a fraction of what 007’s fourth adventure had to work with, but it still hindered my enjoyment somewhat.

I also didn’t like use of magic during the climactic battle either. I know in wuxia movies you have to be able to suspend your disbelief a little, but I felt the summoning of mini tornados emerging from the fighter’s hands was a bit much and it didn’t really gel with the rest of the film and I don’t think it was really needed either as the rest of the film is fairly serious in tone. Also in the final fight it felt like all of a sudden both men were covered in tons of blood which seemed to come from nowhere. Speaking of the blood this movie is by far the bloodiest one I have reviewed so far with lots of squibs and even limbs getting cut clean off (though the severed arms did look incredibly fake) which was pretty shocking for to me compared with the previous nine films viewed in my marathon.

The villain of the movie was called Jade Faced Tiger, played by Chang Hun-lit, and he was incredibly hateable, one of the best bad guys so far. His face was painted white and I am confused as to why to be honest and it doesn’t even make sense with his name as jade is green. Tiger goes as far to kill a child monk who was eavesdropping onto a conversation he and his men were having and while a child was killed off-screen in For a Few Dollars More it still stunned me seeing the boy get stabbed and made me hate Jade Faced Tiger even more than I did because of his silly face paint. The fact I hated the bad guy so much made it very frustrating that he escapes at the movies end with no resolution! That’s two of the last three films I have seen where the bad guy gets away! What is it with 1965? About two thirds into the movie we are introduced to the abbot character and the movie dives into his history with the Drunken Cat and we are supposed to be happy with the confrontation between them two rather than a battle with Cheng Pei-pei’s Golden Swallow (stop sniggering!) defeating Jade Faced Assassin which is what the film seemed to be building up towards.

When the Drunken Cat character first stumbled into the movie I was concerned as often comedy in martial arts movies does fall flat for me (it is the worst part about the otherwise excellent Legendary Weapons of China which we’ll be talking about when I get to 1982) but in the end I rather liked his character and upon watching the inn scene again, where he first is introduced, I saw that his annoyingly random interruptions were all done to help Golden Swallow and distract her enemies and it made me appreciate him more. Although he drinks a lot he doesn’t fight in a drunken boxing style sadly but nevertheless he still was an inspiration to Jackie Chan’s 1978 breakout role in Drunken Master. Supposedly a very young Jackie Chan is even in Come Drink with Me as one of orphans that Drunken Cat looks after and Chan’s website lists the film amongst his filmography but Cheng Pei-pei has since said the rumours are sadly not true. So I liked Drunken Cat but not enough to see him hijack the films finale from Golden Swallow.

Golden Swallow is the first great female action star we’ve seen so far and I loved Cheng Pei-pei’s portrayal of her and find Swallow perfectly believable as this arse-kicker. While I have been critical of some of the editing I have to say there are a couple of nice long takes where we see Pei-pei fighting without interruptions and while she’s not exactly the quickest or best fighter we’ll see she does bring a rather balletic style to the role that I like. Much in the same way that Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi have no formal martial arts background, but instead one in dance, Pei-pei’s uses her ballet skills to give the combat a nice poetic grace which makes her different to some of the other martial arts stars we will talk about soon.

Overall despite a lack of polish which you have to accept from the cheaper production values of a 1960’s Hong Kong movie and a rather by-the-numbers script I think Come Drink with Me is still a highly enjoyable movie with a kick-ass female lead.

7/10- While the importance of the film cannot be overstated I wish it wasn’t as hurt by editing issues as it is. We’ll be talking about director King Hu again in this column so it’ll be interesting to see if his next picture is a tidier affair.

Best quote: “I want to pay that lady’s bill. She’ll be too dead to pay.”

Best scene: I am going for the battle at the Buddhist temple where Golden Swallow fights several men with ease.

Kick-ass moment: Two of Swallow’s female soldier allies are in trouble in a battle against two men until Swallow throws two daggers in the men’s backs at the same time.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we are going back not just to the west, but to the Wild West and will be analysing the Good and the Bad of one of the true Western great. Oh and the Ugly too…

Thunderball (1965)

Thunderball (1965)

Director: Terrence Young

Starring: Sean Connery

Look up! Look down! Look out! Here comes the biggest Bond of them all!

When Sectre #2 Emilio Largo steals two atomic bombs MI6 assign all of their 00 agents to the case and James Bond is dispatched to the Bahamas to follow up on a lead.

Following on from the massive success of Goldfinger EON Productions must have been worried as to how they could possible top the crazy success that movie had. Their solution as evidenced by the tagline above was just to make everything bigger. More girls for Bond to bed, more gadgets, even more exotic locations and rather than a plot on a small scale they were to go full-hog and have Spectre steal nuclear weapons. So did it work? Well commercially it absolutely did and Thunderball went on to top even Goldfinger’s remarkable gross profit and become the most successful 007 movie at the box office. Remarkably even today when adjusted for inflation it is still the highest grossing Bond movie and one of the top fifty highest earning films ever. So it was a massively success comically, but how does it actually stand up today? Well while the first three films are almost universally loved Thunderball is perhaps the most divisive film of the franchise with some saying it’s amongst the best whereas a lot of Bond fans, of which I consider myself, view it as one of the very worst. So what do I think?

Okay so here goes. I am just going to come out and say it right now. Thunderball is without a doubt my favourite Bond movie of them all. I know it’s not a perfect movie and I know it’s downright ridiculous at times, but I just love the film in all its imperfect glory. I mentioned in my review of From Russia with Love that when I first saw all the Bond movies aged thirteen during an ITV Bond Marathon in 1999 I didn’t really enjoy Bond’s second movie and thought of it as one of the worst in the series as I preferred the more outlandish 007 films like A View to a Kill, Goldfinger and The Man with the Golden Gun. That was true with Thunderball, but even more so as it, along with Diamonds are Forever- a film too silly even for thirteen year old me- was probably my least favourite of the franchise. Years later I bought the DVD boxset just prior to Skyfall’s release and a friend I decided to watch a Connery Bond and opted for Thunderball and my opinion of the film completely changed.

So why didn’t I like it at the time and what made me change my mind on it? Well the biggest complaint about Bond’s fourth film are the underwater scenes, particularly the huge battle at the end. I used to hate it whenever 007 donned a swimsuit in movies like For Your Eyes Only or License to Kill as it would no doubt end up with Bond having a slow-motion hard-to-follow fight with a random henchman at some point, but I do actually find Thunderball’s fights exciting these days rather surprisingly. Perhaps it’s helped that we are now in an age where most fights in action blockbusters are a complete mess of quick editing and the shaky camera we’ve all come to loathe but not only do I not find the Thunderball’s underwater scenes boring anymore but I think the climactic battle with Largo’s henchman and the MI6 agents to be a well-choreographed thrilling spectacle. Yeah the underwater battle does go on a long time and I am not too sure why Largo’s goons swim out to fight the MI6’s men rather than stand on the Disco Volante (Largo’s boat) and throw grenades, or better yet just sail out to sea, but I watch it in a sense of awe. There’s obviously no CGI here so we actually have some twenty odd people staging a battle in the Bahamas Sea with actual sharks, octopuses and crustaceans swimming around it. Even if you don’t find it entertaining you can’t deny how spectacular it all is. The battle at the end also contains one of the most shockingly violent moments in a Bond movie when a henchman gets a harpoon stabbed through his diving mask and presumably into an eye. That’s some Timothy Dalton era violence right there! I do have one reservation however which is that it appears that, unless there was some amazing trickery involved, at least two sharks are shot with harpoons during the making of the movie which is pretty inexcusable.

Another common criticism is that the villain Largo (acted by Adolfo Celi and dubbed by Robert Riety) is weak and a bit forgettable. I kind of agree with that and concede that he certainly isn’t as memorable as Dr No, Rosa Klebb or Goldfinger but I do kind of like his understated villainy and for some reason I find him constantly feeding his henchman to his pet sharks to be darkly hilarious. His sharks join Dr No’s tarantula as the second in a long line of failed animal related deaths in the Bond canon. Also he is shagging his niece (a fact which everybody repeats with such regularity without reacting like it’s no big deal) and if that’s not pure evil I don’t know what is!

The other major complaint people have is that we see Spectre executing their whole plan at the movie’s beginning and Bond has to play catch-up all film and yes they are correct, but I don’t think it is a problem. I can see it takes away all the mystery to it, but didn’t we know Kronsteen’s plan from the start of From Russia with Love too? Yet nobody complains about it in that film. Also it’s not like any of the Bond movies really have a compelling mystery to them. In Goldfinger for instance we are straight up told at the start that he’s the bad guy and in most of the movies, Goldfinger included, we have a silly scene where the villain basically says “Before I kill you Mr Bond, let me reveal my evil plan to you!.... It’s so cunning isn’t it?! Gwaaa haaa haaa…..ha? Oh, crap. He’s escaped. And now he knows my plan. Bugger” So at least Thunderball doesn’t fall into that tired clichéd trap and besides Colombo is one of the best TV shows ever and every episode of that reveals who the killer is and how they did it upfront and it is still incredible, so I don’t think knowing the villain’s plot before 007 does is really a deal breaker.

The way Bond learns about Spectre’s scheme is one of the problems of the movie however. You see Spectre agent Count Lippi, played by Guy Dolemon (who were just saw playing Harry Palmer’s boss in the Ipcress File) has hired a pilot to have plastic surgery to look like a an officer in the French Airforce, take his place on a plane carrying the two atomic bombs, kill his fellow pilots and deliver the bombs to Largo. Meanwhile another Spectre Agent, the delectable Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), is distracting the real pilot with her feminine charms in a spa while they wait for his doppelganger to arrive and kill the man he is impersonating. Now all of this is fine, and would be okay, were it not for the fact James Bond just so happens to be staying in the same spa at the same time as Volpe, Lippi the pilot and the man designed to look like him. It’s just such a coincidence that 007 happens to be there at the same time and it really stretches the credibility of the movie from the start.

There are some similar moments of bizarre happenstance such as during the pre-title sequence when Bond is at the funeral of a Spectre agent with the initials “JB”, another nice Bond-is-dead fake-out, but he spots that the dead man’s widow opening the car door himself and thus must be a man and he works out that the widow is actually the dead man himself. I do love the old 1960’s snobbery that no woman would ever possibly open a car door herself, heavens forbid, and I love the shock of Bond punching what appears to be grieving widow in the face, but I don’t know why the Spectre member would turn up at his own fake funeral…. Just what were you thinking? What is the point of going to all the trouble of faking your death if you are going to turn up to the funeral anyway?

There are also several instances of bad continuity too in Thunderball with the one that stood-out most being when Q, who we see out in the field for the first time which I personally always enjoy, giving Bond several gadgets including a watch that is also a Geiger counter and a camera that takes underwater photos. Later on in the movie Bond gives the camera to this movie’s Bond girl Domino (Claudine Auger but voiced once again by Nikki van der Zyl) and tells her it works as a Geiger counter. No, it’s not Bond, it’s the watch! I honestly don’t know how such a silly mistake like that could happen in a major motion picture. I also don’t know why he didn’t give her the watch as she certainly would look less conspicuous walking around on her Uncle’s boat looking for the bombs if the Geiger counter was a small wristwatch rather than a huge camera. Thanks for Domino walking around the boat with Bond’s gadget she is inevitably caught by Largo, but the she is freed by one of his henchmen. That henchman is then pushed out of the boat by Bond, moments before it crashes, but also before he informs 007 that he can’t swim. The man is never seen again so presumably he drowned I guess??

Another complaint I have is with the editing. Peter Hunt, the editor, ending up asking for the movie’s release to be delayed three months as that’s how long it would take to edit the movie to a high enough standard so I have a ton of a sympathy for him, but maybe he should have asked for one more month? The fight on the Dissco Volante boat at the end where Hunt speeds up the footage to supposedly make everything more exciting is just laughably awful not helped by the worst rear projection of any movie yet during our reviews. There is even a horrific jump cut in the sequence too which is something I thought we had left behind in Dr No. There is a massive continuity error, yes another one, where Bond’s blue mask is knocked off his face, so he instead picks up a mask from a deceased henchman which was black, but in the very next cut Connery is wearing the blue mask again. I know he can only work with the footage provided to him, but could he not just cut out the mask being knocked off part altogether if it will be contradicted mere seconds later?

So there are a lot of issues with Thunderball and yet it remains my favourite in the series, so why is that? Well for starters I think this is Connery’s best performance in the role to date. I have read that after films four films in as many years Connery looks bored in Thunderball but if that was the case I have never noticed it. I think he is excellent in this movie, even if his hair piece that he has had to wear in every film looks slightly off this time around. While there are problems with the script I think the dialogue in Thunderball might be the best and if this isn’t the wittiest 007 movie is certainly is the funniest. Some of the lines are great and include classic one-liner puns like when he shoots a henchman with a harpoon gun “I think he got the point” along with his rapport with Domino “How did you know that my name was Domino” “It’s written on the bracelet on your ankle.” “Oh what sharp little eyes you have.” “Wait to you get to my teeth.”

I also really enjoy his interactions with Largo. When they first meet and Largo is playing cards Bond is hilariously blatantly letting the villain know he knows he works for Spectre and baiting him with “I thought I saw a Spectre on your shoulder… The Spectre of defeat I mean. So it’s your Spectre against my Spectre.” Better still is when he visits Largo at his home and sees Fiona Volpe’s rifle in Largo’s hands. “What an interesting gun, it looks more fitting for a woman” states 007. “Do you know lots about guns Mr Bond?” “No. I know a little something about women.” Largo’s slight wry smile to that joke is my favourite moment of his in the whole film. You get the impression that if he and Bond weren’t at opposite ends of the law they could just go to a bar, order some booze and talk about women. I don’t think there are many moments where Bond has made a villain laugh at all and I really think that small smile helps humanise Largo and gives him more character than he is given credit for. He also has an eyepatch and that will never not be awesome.

Connery is even better with his interactions with bad-girl Fiona Volpe. After 007 has had a close shave with death after spying near Largo’s boat he is offered a lift back to Nassau from Fiona. Connery notices Volpe’s Spectre Octopus ring and becomes alarmed at how fast and reckless she is driving. Why do Spectre agents wear something that reveals they are evil like that? It’s silly. I would love to own on though. Volpe pulls up outside Bond’s hotel and says that she is staying here too. “What a coincidence” Fiona mockingly says before Connery, at his most sarcastic, replies with “Yes, so convenient.” Volpe then asks if Bond is okay as he looks paler and reckons “Some men just don’t like to be driven” before 007 comes back at her with an excellent “No, some men just don’t like to be taken for a ride.” Seriously this dialogue is outstanding.

There is also some psychical comedy such as when Bond arrives at MI6 and excitedly looks to toss his hat onto the hat-rack like he has done in the previous three films only to see that to his immense disappointment the hat-rack is now right next to the door. Connery’s crestfallen face as he has to simply place the hat on the stand makes me laugh every time. The funniest, and best, scene in the movie and potentially any Bond movie is when Bond enters his adjoining hotel room to seek out his fellow agent only to instead find Fiona Volpe in the bath tub with her nude body only covered up by the bubbles. “Aren’t you in the wrong room Mr Bond?” “Not from where I’m standing.” “Since you’re here do you mind giving me something to put on?” James Bond then hands the naked Fiona her shoes and then sits down on chair to watch her exit the bath. It might sound creepy on Bond’s part but I still think it is just the coolest scene ever put to film.

That nicely brings me to the best thing in Thunderball and that is without a Fiona Volpe. I have heard complaints levelled at Thunderball because henchman Vargas, the guy who “got the point”, is a really weak henchman, but they seem to miss the fact that he’s not the main henchman of the movie, Fiona is. I think because she’s female and she sleeps with Bond that people think she is a Bond girl or create a sub category of ‘Bad Bond Girl’ (perhaps they are the same people who think Renard is the main villain of The World is Not Enough and not Elektra King) but make no mistake Fiona is second-in-command in Largo’s plan, not boring Vargas and she’s just awesome.

When we first see Fiona she is in bed with the soon to be killed French pilot, who is being a bit lecherous by suggesting that maybe she would be more comfortable if she removed her top, and she just seems like a bit of eye candy. However Fiona is soon bossing the henchman around, ordering them to close the hotel room door to avoid being seen and to keep the noise down. When the pilot’s doppelganger says he wants more money Count Lippi aims at his gun at him, but it is Fiona who takes charge of the situation by seeing the bigger picture and agreeing to the demands showing that she outranks her fellow Spectre agent. The next time we see Lippi he is being killed, due to his hiring of the greedy new pilot, and is offed by a motorcyclist who’s motorbike is equipped with machineguns. I imagine people in 1965 might have assumed the motorcyclist would have been a man and been rather surprised when the crash helmet was removed revealing Paluzzi’s beautiful red hair.

Paluzzi initially read for the role of Domino and I am so glad she was cast instead as Volpe, with the character of Fiona being changed to that of an Italian to suit her, as she would have been completely wasted in the rather thankless Domino role. As Volpe she steals literally every scene she is in, whether she is riding the motorbike, driving her car so fast that it makes 007 nervous, firing a rifle with 100% accuracy and even mocking Largo for wanting Bond dead simply because he flirts with his woman. The way she delivers that line to Largo and flicking her cigarette in disgust at Largo’s jealously is so perfect. It also should be noted that after Bond hands her shoes to her in the bath she never loses the upper hand in that scene and removes the towel from her hair and covers herself up. Yes, she sleeps with Bond, but in a complete reverse of what Bond did to Miss Taro in Dr No it was Fiona who had sex with 007 to distract him until her goons got to the room. Then in one of my favourite scenes she berates Bond and his magical penis that had converted women to his side like Pussy Galore. “But of course, I forgot your ego, Mr Bond, James Bond, the one where he has to make love to a woman, and she starts to hear heavenly choirs singing. She repents, and turns to the side of right and virtual… but not this one!” She is easily the strongest female character we’ve encountered so far and is my favourite character in all of Bondium.

The rest of the cast are pretty good too. It seems redundant to heap praises on M, Moneypenny and Q at this point as they are always excellent, but we have our third Felix in as many appearances, this time played by the awesomely named Rick Van Nutter. I quite like Nutter actually, okay he’s not Jack Lord, but I can still picture him being a close ally of Bond unlike the older looking actor from Goldfinger. One thing I don’t like is that because it’s a new actor in the role the film shows him lurking in the background of shots, hinting that he might have nefarious plans for 007, but nope it’s his friend. It just feels like a cheap trick creating suspense by casting a new actor in a role which should by now be familiar to us. On a re-watch you think to yourselves ‘Why don’t you just say “Hi James” rather than spying on him?’ Also when finally decides to say hello and knocks on Bond’s hotel room door he is greeted by Bond with a punch to the gut because he nearly reveals James’ codename in front of a henchman. “Sorry Felix, but you were just about to say ‘007’” explains Bond, right in front of the henchman he didn’t want Felix to say it in front of! How did nobody on set realise that is stupid?

Domino isn’t the most memorable of 007 girls, but if you aren’t going to hire a great actress you might as well sign up a Miss France and I think her and Fiona Volpe are the two most beautiful women to ever be in a 007 movie. Then we get another appearance of Blofeld who is notably not bald like future incarnations. Like From Russia with Love I much prefer a faceless Blofeld to one where you see his face as after such build up no revelation will ever be able to live up to it. Blofeld also gives us another one of his classic “You failed me, I am going to kill you! Psyche! I am going to kill the guy next to you instead!” moments. Those never get old.

Aside from Connery and Paluzzi the other star of the show for me are the locations. Ken Adams sets again are simply awe-inspiring, with the lair where Spectre secretly meet being a favourite of mine with its chairs that can descend from the room with a dead body on and elevate without the victim on which is useful whenever Blofeld decides to kill one of his minions. The hall where MI6 and all the 007 agents meet to discuss Largo’s plan is really awe-inspiring with how large it is which immediately makes the threat out to be a massive problem that needs to be solved. Then there is Nassau and the Bahamas in general which are simply breath-taking. The sun, the sea, the sharks, it’s incredible and the underwater photography is unbelievable. These days with cheaper air travel and Go-Pros it’s easy to take these landscapes and photography for granted but they must have seemed like another world to 1960’s British audiences. Fifty years on and they still look spectacular to me and I am amazed at some of the footage of the sharks and the fact that Connery is clearly doing his own swimming.

Composer John Barry does his best work in a 007 flick yet and earns high praise from me for bringing back the wonderful 007 Theme, but I have to say that I really don’t like the title song, though I know it wasn’t written by Barry. Dionne Warrick’s ‘Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ was supposed to be the movie’s theme tune, before the producers decided they needed the theme to feature the movie’s title so we get Tom Jones’ Thunderball. Jones does a good enough job, famously fainting in the recording studio hitting the final note, the lyrics however are nonsensical. I don’t think the song writer had a copy of the movie script as the lyrics seem to think that Thunderball is the movie’s villain in the same vein as Goldfinger rather than the name of 007’s mission and it really hurts the song as what Jones is singing makes no bloody sense. They should have stuck with Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang honestly as the first two movies didn’t have a title theme with the title in ithr and Dr No even had Three Blind Mice at the credits end for goodness sake! That takes me nicely into the credits and Maurice Binder returned after a two movie absence and gives us the template for all future title sequences with the naked women swimming and all the underwater imagery. It is still one of my all-time favourite and easily the best so far.

So overall while Thunderball is a flawed movie, I think the good far outweighs the bad and if you need further convincing it has a working jetpack in it! Sadly this was the final Bond movie directed by Terrence Young who had previously overseen both Dr No and From Russia with Love and while most the later Bond films were still entertaining I feel like they lost the sense of class that the earlier ones had under Young and Connery. I will be covering another Young movie I have never seen however and look forward to seeing how well he will do outside of the Bond movies.

9/10- Yeah I am giving this a higher mark than Goldfinger as I love the scale and scenery of the movie. The dialogue is outstanding and it has the best Bond giving hid best performance plus Luciana Paluzzi who is incredible.

Best quote: “Do you mind if my friend sits this one out? She’s just dead.”

Best scene: Bond meets Fiona in the bath.

Kick-ass moment: 007 shooting Vargas with the harpoon “I think he got the point.”

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we venture to Hong Kong for the first time for our first taste of martial arts. Come enjoy with me.

The Ipcress File (1965)

The Ipcress File (1965)

Director: Sidney J. Furie

Starring: Michael Caine

The spy story of the century.

When yet another in a long line of British scientists goes missing the British intelligence send army-sergeant-turned-spy Harry Palmer to investigate.

Before he was Jack Carter, Charlie Croker or Alfie, Michael Caine had his first starring role in the Ipcress File as spy Harry Palmer. Released a year after Goldfinger and at the height of Bondmania comes this smart low-key alternative to the glamourous 007 movies. The juxtaposition between the Connery adventures and this movie are one of the highlights of the film for me too. While Bond is off having exciting times in Jamaica or Istanbul Harry Palmer is having to do paperwork detailing how much fuel he has used. While Bond is battling megalomania villains on a gold-plated aeroplane and driving his Aston Martin DB5, Harry Palmer is battling fellow customers as he tries to negotiate his shopping trolley around a store. Most amusingly while Bond has shown in Dr No that he is an expert in fine wines Harry Palmer instead reveals himself to be an expert in tinned foods. Also while M has a nice lavish office the spies in this film hide in plain sight and meet in a run-down warehouse room that pretends to be a storeroom for fireworks.

What makes these difference between the two styles of spy movies more interesting is that The Ipcress File comes from a lot of the same people who made the first three Bond films. Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman produces this movie too and he brought editor Peter Hunt, set-designer Ken Adams and composer John Barry along for the ride too. While such a low-key serious spy thriller such as the Ipcress File, which uses real buildings in London, can’t utilize Adams’ imagination to its full potential this might be the best work we’ve seen from editor Peter Hunt so far. Long gone are the awful jump cuts of Dr No and some of the edits here like when a ceiling lightshade in one scene fades into a soundwave reader in the next being an especially good transition. John Barry’s score might be my favourite of his so far and yes he still uses the movie’s, quite excellent, theme tune a lot at least here it is more suitable for the quieter moments than the exciting James Bond theme with its roaring brass band.

Michael Caine is just great as Harry Palmer giving the role of all his natural cockney cocky attitude. He might not have 007’s airmiles or salary (I really liked him asking his boss if he was getting a pay rise after he was given a promotion, something I can’t imagine Bond doing with M) but he still has a way with women as we see in the opening scene where he finds a bracelet in his bed from the night before along with… his gun? I guess Harry is into some extreme kinky foreplay… I like Caine’s performance (I like Caine in everything I’ve seen him in) and Harry is a fine character, but he oddly doesn’t really do anything. Yes at the start he tracks down the bad guy, but then he lets him slip through his fingers right after. It’s odd that in this thriller our hero doesn’t solve any of its mysteries and what is solved is done by Craswell (The Great Escape’s Gordon Jackson) while everything else just sort of falls into his lap. He’s probably the least proactive lead we’ve seen in a movie so far in this blog.

The rest of the cast are serviceable if unmemorable aside from Guy Dolemon’s M-like stern, never-smiling Colonel Ross and Jackson who I have tons of good will towards thanks not only to the Great Escape but to his role as Geoff Cowley in The Professionals which was Britain’s answer to Starsky & Hutch and the coolest show ever to my young self.

Caine might be the leading man but the real star of the film for me was director Sidney J. Furie. I don’t really enjoy getting too deep into film production as like the Big Lebowski’s Donnie I am out of my element really but I just adored the direction of this film. Almost every shot is filmed as if we are spying on the characters which given the subject matter is simply inspired. You can see a small example of it in the picture I have used for this article, where Harry's face is partially obscured, but there are far better instances of it. One of the first shots is Palmer walking down the street towards a safe house and Furie films this from the other side of the road with the camera running parallel to Michael Caine, but suddenly Harry stops to go into the secret house, but the cameraman keeps on walking a little bit further like he was taken by surprise, almost as if the cameraman didn’t know where the safe house was either. We spy on our characters through slightly ajar doors, in reflections of parking meters, over the shoulders of other characters and in one of the most incredible shots I’ve ever seen we see a dead man’s face through a tiny hole of a cell door.

That last one of the dead man is a twenty five second tracking shot following Caine, Jackson and a policeman down a corridor to the cell, opening and closing the door and the victim’s head is perfectly framed within one of the door’s holes and I simply can’t fathom how many times it must have taken in order to get that shot as perfect as it is. It’s simply a piece of movie magic and that take, along with the movie as a whole, represents cinema as an art form at its finest. I looked up Furie’s other directional work as I was so impressed and wanted to know what else he had done and while he was helmed a lot of projects the only other movie I had even heard of is the infamous Superman 4. Too bad as it looked like he was a very talented man based on this evidence.

I had so much fun marvelling at the cinematography and composition at the shots but I wish the plot matched the rest of the films brilliance. I know it was based on Len Deighton’s novel of the same name and I have no idea how closely this film stayed faithful to it but not a lot seemed to happen. I am not saying I want thrilling action scenes or huge explosions, but just when the plot got really interesting Caine’s character ends up getting abducted and then hypnotised (in scenes that do look rather dated fifty years on) before he breaks free and the movie wraps itself up soon thereafter. The hypnotising scenes also seemed to open a small plot hole where the film’s bad guy nicknamed ‘Blue Jay’ very specifically orders Palmer to obey his voice commands, but then later the secondary bad guy tells Harry, who has since escaped, to obey his voice too, which seems to contradict the whole point of the hypnotising scene which was to make Palmer obey only the Blue Jay’s voice. The ending was very abrupt too with the death of the secondary bad guy whilst Blue Jay is still at large, perhaps to appear in another novel in the series one would assume.

This is not an action film, but I thought it would be interesting to get a different take on a secret agent movie and overall this is a really slick, clever well made film with Michael Caine as his most famous character and one which would go on to influence The Kingsman, where Caine himself stars, with Colin Firth’s character wearing the thick-rimmed glasses in a tribute to Palmer, in addition to the Austin Powers series where Mike Myers, and later Caine too playing Austin’s Father, also wear the same glasses.

8/10- A really enjoyable realistic take on espionage with beautiful direction and a super charismatic lead actor.

Best quote: “You won’t have time for cooking. Dalby works his men and he doesn’t have my sense of humour.” “Yes, sir. I will miss that, sir.” Said in the most deadpan sarcastic way possible by Caine.

Best scene: Palmer and Russ meeting in the supermarket just for how absurdly mundane it is.

Kick-ass moment: Palmer kicking open the door to the safe houses bedroom to scare his colleague simply for his own entertainment. “Morning.”

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we go from this small subtle spy thriller to the biggest adventure so far from the most famous of secret agents. I think you get the point.