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.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte

The Man with No Name is back.

The Man with No Name is indeed back and this time he wants more dollars, $10,000 to be exact. The money comes in the form of Indio, an escaped criminal planning to rob a bank, who is also dealing with demons from his past. However there is another bounty hunter pursuing Indio too one who will not stand aside and let our hero take the rewards. Lastly there is a haunting jingle of a pocket watch which is shrouded in mystery and violence.

After the success Sergio Leone had with A Fistful of Dollars (in Europe anyway, the movie was not well-received in the US) another spaghetti western was always going to happen and the great director brought back his old crew including composer Ennio Morricone, star Clint Eastwood and the previous movie’s villain Gian Maria Volonte, this time in a new role. Previous to this blog I had only seen the first two parts of what came to be known as the ‘Dollars Trilogy’ once before about fifteen years ago. While I instantly fell in love with the final movie The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and I was quite fond of A Fistful of Dollars I didn’t enjoy For a Few Dollars More nearly as much. I have no idea why however as this movie is really good. I think maybe at the time after having heard many times that these three movies were part of a trilogy, even in reality they are not directly related films, I was confused as to why Volonte’s character was still alive and it took away some of my immersion.

The plot here, despite being more intricate than the previous film, lacks the crazy action set-pieces such as Roman’s gang shooting their rivals as they flee from the burning house but instead it builds up its characters and the ending here has far more emotional impact than the trigger-happy ending of Fistful. Well there are characters with a bit more depth here but Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name (nicknamed Manco this time round) isn’t really one of them and is as aloof as ever. In Fistful there was a quick throw-away line about something in his past that made him act heroic and defend Marisol against Ramon, but here he is just after the almighty dollar. I don’t mind that at all though as the less we know about Eastwood’s cowboy the more enigmatic he becomes. He also shoots a person without even looking at them at one point too. Such a badass.

I did love what they did with the bad guy El Indio (Volonte’) and think it was a great upgrade from his evil heartless villain of the previous movie. Oh he is still a complete sick psycho here, at one point he guns down a mother and child to get back at an old rival, but he carries around the pocket watch of one of his previous victims and is completely tormented by the clockwork jingle it makes, turning to marijuana as a coping mechanism to deal with the horrid deed he did. Volente is such an engaging actor and he has a magnetic presence that makes it hard for me to take my eyes of him. His El Indio, while almost as much of a mystery as Eastwood’s cowboy aside from a flashback of the incident that haunts him, is a fascinating character to watch. I feel that it is a massive shame he wasn’t brought back in some way for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly as he has added so much to the trilogy in his two roles that it’s sad he wasn’t in the grand finale. If I could go back in time I would love to have convinced Leone to direct a fourth movie so they could have added an extra adjective to Good, Bad and Ugly (Weird perhaps?....) and made that film end in an epic four way shoot-out.

The third lead in this film is Lee Van Cleef’s Colonel Douglas Mortimer and in many ways this is Van Cleef’s movie. I think every scene in this film includes one of the three main actors and while it’s El Indio’s actions that drive the plot along it is Mortimer who has the closest ties to our antagonist whilst Eastwood is really just along for the ride, almost a side character in his own movie. Van Cleef might even get more screen time and dialogue than Eastwood (which isn’t saying that much as The Man with No Name is famously shy of words) and I found myself rooting more for him than Clint. When Mortimer says they should team up I agreed completely and was annoyed at Manco when he tried to break their pact. Van Cleef gives a great performance and it’s alluded to in the movie that he is just like Eastwood’s character but a decade or so older and wiser which is matched very well by Van Cleef who gives out a confident portrayal of a man who’s seen this all before and is way smarter than everyone around him. I especially enjoyed it when Eastwood kept shooting Mortimer’s hat whenever Van Cleef tried to pick it up in a futile attempt to intimidate him and force him to quit his pursuit of Indio’s bounty. In return Mortimer shoots Manco’s hat off his head and then basically juggles with it by firing five more shots at the hat before it even touched the ground. Amazing. While I’m sad Volonte won’t be in the third movie I am happy we get to see one more film of Lee Van Cleef in my retrospective reviews.

Director Sergio Leone and composer Ennio Morricone pretty much mastered the western in the first attempt but if anything they have both improved here. Leone is now using some fantastic wide angles including the opening scene where a man rides a horse a few hundred feet in the distance before being shot to the ground by the gun of an unseen man in the foreground. It’s never revealed who the man on the horse or who the shooter were but it’s a spectacular camera shoot nonetheless. I also loved the shot during the Mexican standoff at the end of the film with Van Cleef on the far left, Volonte on the far right and Eastwood in the middle and it feels like a small hint as to what is to come next. Of course Leone is perhaps more famous for his extreme close-ups and in this film we get our first shots that show nothing but a character’s eyes which is something that has become such an iconic western visual now. Also the landscapes are simply stunning at times too and it feels like Leone is showing off in the best kind of way at times.

Then there is Morricone who composes another good theme tune, though I do like A Fistful of Dollars more, but it’s the beautiful, slow, creepy piece ‘30 Seconds to What?’ that plays every time Indio opens up the pocket watch that is truly his best work in the movie. I can’t say how much I adore that piece and it is the most memorable thing in the film (it was even sampled on an awesome garage track by 187 Lockdown called the Gunman) and it’s been stuck in my head all day- finally replacing the theme from Faster, Pussycat! Kill Kill! I also really liked the clock-tower chime piece he used when El Indio was telling his second-in-command that he knew Manco and Mortimer were bounty hunters all along and that he was planning to kill them. The revelations and plotting went so well with the chimes after every sentence.

So was For a Few Dollars More as good as A Fistful of Dollars? I really can’t decide between the two, but when they are both this good does it matter? Leone, Morricone, Eastwood and Van Cleef were all excellent and I am so very much looking forwards to reviewing the final part of the trilogy.

8/10- This second instalment was a marvellous follow-up and you can see that everyone involved is just getting better and better. Now, time for them to make a masterpiece.

Best quote: No, old man. I thought I was having trouble with my adding. It’s all right now.

Best scene: I am going to go with the end duel between Mortimer and Indio.

Kick-ass moment: Mortimer is trying to collect a bounty but the man he pursuing is fleeing on a horse. Not fazed at all Mortimer walks to his own horse, suddenly unfurls a pouch that contains four rifles, casually picks one up and shoots the fleeing man dead.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we’ll be talking about another British secret agent movie. But this time it isn’t Bond…

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Director: Russ Meyer

Starring: Tura Sutana, Haji, Lori Williams

Superwomen! Belted, buckled and booted!

It was a day like any other for Tommy and Linda, a young all-American couple like any other, as they drove out the desert without a care in the world, but unbeknownst to them await a trio of murderous go-go girls. Who will survive and what will be left of them?

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to violence! While violence cloaks itself it a plethora of disguises its favourite mantle still remains sex” claims the movie’s opening narrator, over a black screen. The narrator proceeds to teach us that there is a new form of violence, one encased in the supple skin of a woman, and warns the viewer to be on their guard. For these harbingers of destruction, this new breed of violent women, prowl both alone and in packs. “They operate at anytime, anywhere and with anybody. Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor’s receptionist or a dancer at a go-go club.” There is then a sudden jarring cut to our three ‘heroines’ dancing at a bar while the films amazingly catchy theme music plays. We then see the girls driving lovely vintage sports cars and the main character Varla (Sutana) laughs to herself as the second chorus of The Bostweeds title track kicks in and the title card appears on the screen over Sutana’s face. I really can’t do the opening of this movie justice, but I absolutely loved it, and have watched the start to the film a good twenty times in the last two days. The cut from the narration to the go-go club and the title song instantly playing is just such a sudden jolt of pure trashy excitement. It is honestly one of my favourite starts to a film I have ever seen.

Then the movie begins. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is unique so far in my anthology of action movies as it is the first film reviewed that I had not previously seen before. I knew nothing about the film at all aside from the fact there are three women who kick arse in it. I was hoping and expecting a mixture of the Planet Terror/Death Proof Grindhouse films that were inspired by this and other exploitation movies, and wanting a story where our heroes encounter chauvinistic male pigs and righteously beat them to a bloody pulp. Instead what we got was our supposed heroes killing a man for no reason at all and then kidnapping his girlfriend before they pass her like a dutchie to a lecherous rapist old man in order to distract him whilst they look to find and steal his money. My opening paragraph with its borrowing of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre tagline was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to turn this movie into a horror film as it’s the only way to look at Faster Pussycat to really to make sense of it all.

So-called ‘King of the nudies’ director Russ Meyer made a lot of exploitation movies, all with big chested women and a lot of them with nudity, yet here is a movie which to a lot of people is a feminist classic. Yes none of the women in Faster Pussycat show their breasts in this film but how did one of cinemas most prolific producer of exploitation skin-flicks manage to direct a movie that so many women love? In my opinion it is completely by accident. Russ Meyer, if you take his words at face value, was a disgusting misogynistic dinosaur, having been quoted as having said that a woman’s place is in the kitchen or in the bedroom and that sex is only for men to enjoy. So it seems incredibly unlikely to me that he would make a movie that empowers women on purpose. More likely he just found the idea of buxom women in miniskirts and knee-high boots, driving fast sports cars and going on a killing spree to be sexy and just wrote a quick script, hired the first three gorgeous ladies he found and made a movie. Now that is what you call a passion project. It’s commendable in a way.

Oh yeah, the murders. See that’s what I find strange about the way the ladies of this picture are so beloved. Yeah, they have great dialogue, really great in fact, but they are all freaking psychos. Okay so Billie (Williams) is the lesser of three evils and I have to say that I did love her character. After seeing the first three Bond movies, and to a lesser extent North by Northwest, where the main females were basically a prize for our hero to bed, here we have Billie being the one to pursue the guys- “want to look under my hood?” Of course the main guy she’s hitting on is a mentally handicapped man called ‘Vegetable’ (yes, really), but if we try and ignore that a film showing a woman be this forward and independent “I do whatever feels good” in a movie in 1964 was quite excellent. Also Williams brought a really fun, bubbly personality to this role and at risk of sounding as creepy as the director she is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen put on film. Then there’s Rosie (Haji) who like Billie is guilty of being an accessory to murder, but also of the crime of having an awful Italian accent. Not going to lie, I loved it and laughed every time she spoke.

That brings us to our main character Varla, the hero villain of the film. Donning a black catsuit that shows off as much cleavage as humanly possible this woman is a furious wrecking ball of contempt and pure id. All her lines of dialogue are almost spat out as if the very idea of having to talk to people displeased her. If she is indeed the dangerous, violent, personification of sex the opening introduction warned us about then you should be very afraid indeed. Everyone it seems is scared of her, including friend and possible lover Rosie, and those that aren’t scared by her wind up becoming her victims. Heck, even Varla’s eyebrows look terrified of her and seem to be trying to escape from her face. They are ludicrous. We are never given a reason as to why she’s so angry or why she kills Tommy at the start, but it is notable that she twice gives Tommy a chance to get back into his car and twice he continues to fight her instead. Perhaps he underestimated her in the same way that the old, creepy, lecherous disabled man (played by Russ Meyer, sorry I mean Stuart Lancaster) did and his pride was wounded because she was a female and it was that which cost him his life.

But perhaps Varla doesn’t needs a motive for all of her pent-up rage I guess? To quote Scream’s Billy Loomis “Did Norman Bates have a motive? Did Hannibal Lecter have a motive?” But the lyrics of the theme tune might give a bit of a clue- “It’s sad she doesn’t see what’s wrong from right/She’s running fast and free child of the night/in her life will be no time for love/You’ll never take her make up your mind/You will find Pussycat is living reckless/Pussycat is riding high/If you think you can take her well just you try/Yeah just you try.” Yeah, there’s no taming this reckless pussycat. I do get why women like her character in way thanks her wild devil-may-care spunky attitude, but I actually think the real one they should look to is Linda. Played by sixteen year old future Playmate Susan Bernard Linda is the helpless victim for almost the entire film and risks either being murdered, raped, or both the whole movie but is actually her that kills Varla in the end by running her over with a car. Kirk (Paul Trinka), son of the old man and brother to Vegetable and the only other good person in the film aside from Linda and her late boyfriend, thanks Linda for saving his life, but as Linda more accurately puts it that she didn’t save his life, she saved her own. They then drive off to the excellent theme tune as the credits roll.

So after all that, was the film actually any good? From a technical standpoint no. No it’s not. When I was watching I reacted just like Crusty the Clown when he sees Worker & Parasite, the Eastern European replacement for The Itchy and Scratchy Show, “What the hell was that?” However that being said I have not been able to get this movie, or the theme tune, out of my head since I first watched it and immediately wanted to see it again. I loved the end of the movie and adored the start and I like the middle the more I think about it. So yeah, I am going to surprise myself and give this a decent score.

7/10- As Billie would say- It was a gas.

Best quote: “Well you won’t find it down there Colombus!” says Varla to a gas attendant is talking to her about finding America while unabashedly starring directly at her tits. Yeah, she is pretty cool.

Best scene: Linda finally killing Varla and her and Kirk driving off to the sweet Bostweeds song.

Kick-ass moment: The opening narration with the sudden cut to the go-go dancing and the title song. Just so darn awesome.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow The Man with no Name has a fistful of dollars, but he now wants A Few Dollars More.

Goldfinger (1964)

Goldfinger (1964)

Director: Guy Hamilton

Starring: Sean Connery

James Bond is back in action! Everything he touches turns to excitement!

So Goldfinger is without question the most famous James Bond movie of them all. From the pre-title sequence where Bond unzips a wetsuit to reveal a pristine white tuxedo underneath, to Shirley Bassey blaring out the titular theme tune, to Oddjob decapitating a statue with his hat, to Pussy Galore’s introduction “I must be dreaming”, to the gadget-laden Aston Martin DB5 with ejector seat “I never joke about my work 007”, to the laser scene “Do you expect me to talk?” “No Mr Bond I expect you to die!” and perhaps the most iconic moment in all Bond films, even more so than Ursula Andress emerging from the sea, Shirley Eaton’s dead body painted gold.

This movie feels like a ‘Greatest Hits’ package more than a film and you can see why this movie is credited for being the one that created the so-called “Bond formula” and while I think that all started really in From Russia with Love it was with Goldfinger that Bond movies kind of became their own genre. I mean what genre would you classify Goldfinger in? You have your Bond’s like From Russia with Love and The Living Daylighs that you could label as spy thrillers, your pure action revenge flicks like License to Kill and Quantum of Solace but Goldfinger is… well, it’s a Bond film and there’s really nothing else like it apart from the inferior clones within its own series. So maybe we should just break down the Bond formula to see how well it holds up.

They say a good hero is only as good as its villain and in that regard this move scores well as Auric Goldfinger, played by Gert Frobe and voiced excellently by Michael Collins, is my favourite of the whole franchise. From the moment this portly, balding German sounding Englishman with awful dress sense walks into frame you instantly hate his character. However his plan, not to rob Fort Knox of gold as per the novel, but to detonate a nuclear bomb inside it so that his own gold’s stock rises is so genius (my favourite of the bad guy schemes) and with the hilarious delivery of “I expect you to die!” you can’t help but like the guy. He’s kind of like Die Hard’s Hans Gruber in that you really like him, but still want him to lose. Die Hard is superb, for many reasons, but one is that while the bad guy is strangely endearing, the hero is even more likeable. Here however James Bond is sort of a dick.

I know I called 007 a dick in my Dr No review and used the term to complement our spy but in Goldfinger I think it’s just much. Yes he bedded Taro, knowing he was going to have her arrested after, in Dr No and even struck Tania in From Russia with Love but Goldfinger crosses the line for me. The scene with Pussy Galore in the haystacks has been talked in depth a hell of a lot and I used to defend it slightly in an awful Robin Thicke “you know you want it” (no Robin, they don’t, you creep) way to imply Pussy Galore really wanted Bond, but didn’t want to give into her feelings and I think that is what movie makers were going for, but Pussy fights Bond way too long for that to work. On this rewatch it reminded me of the awful Jamie/Cercei Lannister scene in Game of Thrones where the director wanted it to come across as one thing, but to the viewer it did kind of look like Jamie raped her and the show swept it under the rug never to be mentioned again. I watched Goldfinger this time with my thirteen year old sister, trying to get her into James Bond like I did when I was her age, so I was very sensitive to how women were being treated here what with the haystacks scene and when Bond slaps Dink on the arse and tells her to leave with “Man’s talk.” I’ll justify the Dink moment as just a relic of the sixties but at the least it dates the movie a lot. What I can’t justify however is Bond slagging off the Beatles! What the hell James?! At least they chose a band that stood the test of time as Moneypenny trying to seduce Bond with Barry, bloody, Manilow in the Living Daylights makes me cringe.

While we are talking about pop acts shall we mention Bassey’s theme? Do I like it? Yes. Do I love it? No. I respect the song a lot and when it comes on the radio I might sing along and it might sneak into my top ten themes, but not into my top five or anything. You all know the song though, so the fact it’s so famous is another huge plus for this film. I don’t really like Robert Brownjohn’s credit sequence however as while projecting the casts faces onto gold women sounds great on paper it actually gives away small spoilers for later on in the movie and he seems to run out of footage as time goes on and uses first what appears to be a deleted scene and secondly a clip from From Russia with Love. This was the last time Brownjohn did the credits as for the next movie Maurice Binder would get the job again and would retain it until Piece Brosnan’s first Bond film and the next movie’s title sequence would set the benchmark for them all. John Barry I feel was better on this film, using the Bond theme more wisely and scarcely, though he did sadly drop the 007 theme. I especially liked Barry using the chimes whenever Oddjob appeared and especially when you first catch a glimpse of Shirley Eaton’s Jill Masterson covered in gold. It’s a moment that could have been laughable, but thanks to Connery’s acting and the score it comes across as horrific like it should.

Oddjob for many people is the greatest henchman of all time (in my top three) and he does start two much-copied henchman tropes by being silent and super strong and you can see Oddjob copycats in guys like For Your Eyes Only’s Emile Leopard Locke (silent), Octopussy’s Gobinda (strong), Spectre’s Mr Hinx (silent and super strong) and of course most famously in Jaws. Even with the great deadly bowler hat gimmick Oddjob could have been just another grunt like so many later henchman will be, but Harold Sakata is just wonderful in this role and it’s his smiling portrayal that make Oddjob one of cinema’s best ever bad guys, even more so than Goldfinger himself. Sakata, an Olympic weightlifting silver medallist and former pro-wrestler, was described by director Guy Hamilton as “absolutely charming man” and Harold was actually badly burned during his death scene when he “blew a fuse”, but he still kept hold of his hat to make sure the take looked good. Goldfinger and Oddjob are the best Villain-Henchman pair in any Bond movie.

Honour Blackman, from hit television show The Avengers, was also a delight as Pussy Galore, a name that was nearly changed, particularly in America, to Kitty Galore, but thankfully Pussy remained and Blacktook tried to use the name as much as possible in interviews to promote the movie in effort to cause embarrassment to her hosts. I love Pussy at first (that was an odd thing to type) and think she’s superb deflecting Bond’s flirtations and there’s one exchange with Bond that made me very happy. Bond had previously seen Oddjob kill Jill’s sister Tilly (Tania Mallet) and patronisingly tells this to Pussy in hopes of getting her to switch allegiances with “Do you know he kills little girls like you?” but Galore has none of Bond’s charm, replying with a confident “And little boys too.” It’s just too bad that for all her bravado it’s not Goldfinger planning to kill all the Fort Knox guards, as opposed to using sleeping gas on them like he said he was going to, that gets Pussy to change her ways, but James Bond’s magic penis. It is especially bad after her claim earlier that she was “immune” to him. In the book she was a lesbian and James converts her, so I am glad they didn’t go down the ‘Bond can convert gay women route, but they could have handled it better. Hey at least Galore is competent in judo, and her Flying Circus and her are all competent pilots which is a huge improvement over the damsel in distresses archetype of Honey Ryder and was oddly forward thinking in the sixties, especially from Ian Flemming who has never been accused of being politically correct.

Jill Masterson thanks to the legendary death is a famous Bond girl, but she doesn’t get much to do in her two scenes. Tilly has a bit more of an arc, being out for revenge for her sister which I would love to have seen explored more as a similar Bond girl wanting revenge worked so well in For Your Eyes Only, but she too is killed, again in a very memorable way. It is sad that both sisters died when you think about their family. God Oddjob’s a bastard. A loveable, charming bastard, but a bastard nonetheless. Tilly as the avenging angel is also responsible for my favourite shot in the movie when the camera focuses on Bond on a hill looking at Goldfinger before it zooms out to show Tilly looking at both Bond and our villain. I don’t really like Guy Hamilton’s Bond’s, but Goldfinger is good and his best by a wide margin and that shot was lovely.

The MI6 regulars all their usual wonderful selves, this was my favourite performances by Bernard Lee’s M and Louis Maxwell’s Moneypenny so far, and I liked Moneypenny being the one to throw Bond’s hat onto the rack. Jack Lord was set to return as his Dr No character Felix Leiter, but he demanded more money and a bigger role rivalling Connery’s, so he was axed sadly, but understandably. He was replaced by Cec Linder and I don’t know who this guy is, but it isn’t Felix. He looks way too old to be Bond’s equal, despite Linder being a year younger than Lord, a fact which astounds me. Desmond Llewelyn made his debut in the previous movie but this is where he truly became the Q we know and love. In perhaps Guy Hamilton’s cleverest stroke he told Llewelyn to play the role like he had contempt for Bond, confusing Desmond who said “What? But everyone loves Bond, why wouldn’t I like him?” before Hamilton replied with “Because he doesn’t bring your gadgets back in one piece” and with that bit of direction the friendly antagonistic relationship between Bond and the Quartermaster that defined Q’s character was born and he became the most beloved character of the franchise.

Mentioning Q I guess we have to talk about the iconic Aston Martin DB5. It’s such a beautiful car and the gadgets, especially the ejector seat, are superb. The actual chase leading up to the ejector seat moment and following on from it is rather disappointing however and we’ll have to wait a few more years to get a truly great car chase in cinema. The Aston Martin DB5 is the most popular car in Bond lore, and I do love it although it’s not my favourite, but I do hate its use in the Brosnan and Craig movies. It wasn’t so bad in Piece’s movie actually as while he did drive the Aston in a “look he’s Bond, honest!” way he later got his own great car to rival the DB5 whereas in the Craig movies it feels like they are constantly trying to remind us of better Bond movies and use the DB5 to syphon our goodwill from Goldfinger and Thunderball into the newer films rather than make us like them for what they are. Also Connery had a car, Moore had his Lotus, Dalton got his own cool Aston, Piece had his own, so why can’t Craig get his own signature car rather than ripping off Connery? And don’t even get me started on the fact it’s full of gadgets in Skyfall despite not having met Q yet…. But I’ll get to that when I come to the Craig era…

So I like the car but I like the scene where Q presents it to Bond even more. The “Ejector seat, you must be joking?” “I never joke about my work 007” exchange would be my favourite of the movie if there wasn’t a better one later on. Llewelyn’s deadly serious, almost angry, reply and Connery’s fading smile are simply perfect. My favourite lines of dialogue of course come from the famous laser scene and it’s also my favourite scene of the film too. Bond is in real peril, the most we’ve seen yet in a movie, and he’s against a villain who doesn’t want information, doesn’t want to recruit him, doesn’t want to talk and simply wants him dead in an entertaining fashion and Bond has no way to get out of it. No deux ex machina gadgets, nobody coming to his aid, just two words he overheard earlier and doesn’t know the meaning of. All he has is a bluff and as we saw earlier Goldfinger is not a good card-player and Bond has him beat. It’s such a gripping scene sold so well by everyone involved, especially by Bert Kwouk’s Mr Ling who walks back into shot upon hearing the words “Operation Grandslam” and I adore how it’s contrasted by Goldfinger who adopts a pokerface, trying not to give out any signals, whereas Mr Ling gives the game away.

I want to talk briefly about Ken Adams sets as he returned to the franchise for this movie and again they are beautiful. The set in the laser scene and his Fort Knox are just amazing, but the one I simply love is the set used when Goldfinger is talking to the mobsters about his plan. Adams has rotating pool tables, automatic shutters and an opening floor with a mechanical model of Fort Knox. We are a couple of movies away from his real masterpiece, but this is simply fantastic.

Sadly that set is displayed during the worst scene in the movie. Goldfinger tells the annoying mobsters, complete with 1920’s Chicago accents and terrible dialogue “The floor’s moving” “What’s going on?” “Turn on the lights”, about his plan and he kills the guy who wants no part of it (I do love that the turned him and the car he was murdered in into a cube, that was amazingly horrible) but then he kills the mobsters who wanted in on the plan too, so what was the point of the scene?! I get it was so Bond, and the viewers, would know what Goldfinger’s plan was, or at least his fake plan, but it was so badly written and thought-out. We have had three Bond movies in three years, with the fourth movie released the following year and I am thinking that maybe they are trying to do too much too soon and are making sloppy writing mistakes like this. Also Oddjob, you know I love you, but I do not believe you would be willing to be blown up by an atom bomb to protect Goldfinger’s plan, especially when it had already failed by that point.

Lastly I wanted to say how much I liked the pre-title sequence and I really enjoy when Bond movies give us a mini-story unrelated to the rest of the plot in a "Here's Bond, he's awesome, now onto the film proper" way. The most recent pre-title sequence not connected to the story was way back in A View to a Kill and I think it's about time they brought them back.

I do have some flaws with this film and having watched three Bond movies in four days now I was worried I might be getting too much of a good thing, but Goldfinger is still enjoyable even after having watched it some twenty something times. Let’s see if that continues with Thunderball…

8/10- It’s Goldfinger! What else is there to say? While it’s a weaker movie compared to From Russia with Love it’s one of the very best of the franchise. Try not to overthink things and just enjoy all the famous scenes.

Best quote: “Do you expect me to talk?”, “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!”

Best scene: It’s the laser scene. I know, shocker.

Kick-ass moment: Bond killing the guy by hitting the light into the bathtub. “Shocking. Positively shocking.”

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we enter 1965 with killer go-go girls in an exploitation cult classic.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Director: Sergio Leone

Starring: Clint Eastwood

This is the man with no name. Danger fits him like a glove.

Okay so it’s a spaghetti western and not an action movie, but Leone’s ‘Dollars Trilogy’ with their Mexican stand-offs and violent gun battles really helped influence later movies that I will be talking about. John Woo’s heroic bloodshed films nearly all have a Mexican standoff at some point and Antonio Banderas’s mysterious mariachi player who comes into town and finds himself in trouble is similar to Eastwood’s the Man with No Name, who funnily enough has a name in all three movies, here it is ‘Joe’. Also when talking about the best movie shoot-outs you need to mention The Wild Bunch, which is also a western and a movie I’ll be writing about later, so if that western is fair game then so I feel is A Fistful of Dollars. Also reviewing this means I get a break between Bond movies. Lastly I wanted to include this film as I loved it and well, it’s my blog so there.

From director Sergio Leone, who is a legend despite only directing seven movies, comes his second picture in what is basically an unofficial remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Kurosawa himself said A Fistful of Dollars “is a good movie, but it’s MY movie” and he even won a case against Leon’s movie and got an out-of-court settlement. What Fistful lacks in originality it does make up for however in style and the superb direction of Leone. This is an Italian movie filmed in Spain and the director and star Clint Eastwood had to communicate via one of the movie’s stuntmen who could speak both English and Italian. Indeed the movie was filmed in silent with actors having to dub their own lines in afterwards. Yet none of that matters or hurt the movie as Leone was a master visual storyteller.

Leone’s style is perfectly complimented by the great Ennio Morricone’s fantastic score. Morricone might just be my favourite film composer of all time and I can’t imagine these movies working without his music and it’s what I hear when I think of westerns. I mentioned in my review of North by Northwest how much I respected Alfred Hitchcock for making Cary Grant’s wait for the mysterious George Caplan by the side of the highway so, so long and building up an incredible amount of tension by doing so, well Leone may well do that even better that the great Hitchcock, best shown in Once Upon a Time in the West’s opening scene and the three way shoot-out in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However Leone has said one of the reasons why some of those scenes are so long is because he didn’t want the music to end and with a score this good who can blame him? Leone considered music to be such a huge part of his movies and really this could almost work as a silent movie in many regards. In the opening scene you know what Marisol (Marianne Koch) is thinking just with her facial expressions, tears and hopeful looks to Joe alone.

You have Leone and Morricone who are two thirds of what make these movies so iconic, but the last part of the package is the superb Clint Eastwood in the role he was born to play. I know I use the word “cool” a lot, but when you are talking about Sean Connery’s James Bond, Steve McQueen on a Triumph motorbike or Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ how can you not help but use that word to describe them? Eastwood’s cool, quiet, laconic portrayal fit Leone’s style like a glove. Leone said of Clint’s acting style “More than an actor, I needed a mask, and Eastwood, at that time, had only two expressions: with hat and no hat.”, and I get what he means as he needed a kind of blank canvas for which he could add expression onto with his direction or later with the score or editing, but it still sells Eastwood short on how great he was. For starters the look of the character, besides the poncho, was all Eastwood who bought the spurs, the gun holster, the gun prop, the jeans, the cigars and the hat. I just found out reading on Wikipedia that Eastwood is actually a non-smoker and that blew me away as if there was ever an advert to make smoking look cool (and sadly I’m sure there is) it’s Clint smoking his famous cigars. But no, Eastwood hated the taste of the cigars and reckons the foul taste put him in the right frame of mind for his character. Because The Man with no Name is so laconic it’s easy to overlook Eastwood’s performance, but he can convey more emotion in just the squint of his eye than some actors are capable of with their whole bodies and words.

The rest of the cast are all solid. Gian Marie Volonte’ is perfectly loathsome as villain as Ramon Rojo and I really hated (in the best possible way) Esteban Rojo played by Sieghardt Rupp, with his horrific laugh and smugness when Eastwood’s ‘Joe’ was being beaten up and I was so glad when innkeeper Silvantio (Jose Calvo) shoot him dead. Calvo and Joseph Egger brought real warmth to their roles, as innkeeper and undertaker respectively and were likeable being Joe’s only allies in the film. I feared that Silvantio would be killed due to his relationship with Eastwood which shows how much I liked him. The aforementioned Marianne Koch as Ramon’s kidnapped girlfriend and hostage brought a real vulnerability to her Marisol but I really liked how her weak female character was balanced out by Margarita Lozano’s strong Consuelo Baxter. Consuelo was the wife of the Baxter gang’s leader and sheriff, but she was the matriarch and really called the shots in the gang (it’s telling that Eastwood always spoke to her and not her husband) and Ramon even asks the sheriff if he needs his wife’s permission at one point too. She’s by far the best female character we’ve seen in a movie on my list so far and she was my second favourite person in the film, behind Joe.

I haven’t even touched on the plot to this film, which to be frank is really straightforward and secondary to the characters. It starts when Eastwood’s character rides into a town, a town which he is told by the bell-ringer, can either make you rich or get you killed. The Man with no Name decides to get try and get rich and play two warring families, the Rojos and the Baxters, against each other and get money from both, befriending both sides and crossing, double-crossing and triple-crossing them all. This all goes well until he sees the kidnapped Marisol, who has been pried away from her husband and child, and he decides he has to free her from Ramon’s clutches which has huge consequences. It’s kind of a basic plot, a real familiar one if you’ve seen Yojimbo, but I was engaged and the movie sped by for me so I liked it. I have to mention the huge gunfight, actually a “gun massacre” would be more accurate, at the end where the Rojos gun down the Baxters as it features an incredible stunt of an actor on fire for a really long time. I had to rewind it as I thought maybe I had not seen it properly and it was just a dummy on fire, but nope, it was a stuntman walking out of a burning house, on fire, and falling on the floor, still on fire, for ages before the camera cut. It was great stuff. At the time of release critics called it overly violent, and it was violent for the time, but none of it is violence for violence sakes and all the deaths matter in this movie.

I first, and last, watched this trilogy around fifteen years ago and while I loved the last movie, I didn’t enjoy the first two nearly as much, but this time around I really had fun watching A Fistful of Dollars and am now looking forwards to seeing For a Few Dollars More.

8/10- A really enjoyable western that introduced the world to Clint Eastwood and his famous Man with No Name character. Great film.

Best quote: “Get three coffins ready.” …. “My mistake, make that four coffins.”

Best scene: In between the two quotes above we have Clint Eastwood asking four of the Baxter gang to apologise to his mule and then shooting them all when they don’t. It’s a fantastic introduction to this character.

Kick-ass moment: Innkeeper Silvantio has been tied up by the Rojo gang and is about to be whipped but just when you expect to hear the crack of the whip you instead hear an explosion of dynamite as The Man with No Name has returned to save the day.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow what we’ll be talking about will be “Shocking. Positively shocking.”

From Russia with Love (1963)

From Russia with Love (1963)

Director: Terrence Young

Starring: Sean Connery

James Bond is Back!

After the death of Dr No Spectre leader, a mysterious cat stroking man who’s face is never seen and name is never uttered, wants two things. First he wants to steal the Lektor, a decoding device from the Russians, and then revenge by having James Bond killed. Spectre member #5 Kronsteen, a championship chess player, devices a plan to lure MI6 and James Bond into stealing it for them whilst Spectre #3, Soviet-defector Rosa Klebb, tricks Russian agent Tatiana Romanova into helping Bond and hires assassin Red Grant to shadow the pair, kill them and bring the Lektor to Spectre.

From Russia with Love is regarded to be the best Bond movie of the series by many people. It’s the favourite Bond film of Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, and Daniel Craig along with the creators of the series. Even if it’s not your favourite it’s hard to argue that it is not the best and that the case for me. It’s not my favourite but it’s the most perfect. It’s funny that when I was a child I really didn’t like this one, I think I found it boring, but as I’ve got older, and perhaps wiser, I now view this as the classic it is. It’s not just the best Bond, it’s one of the best British movies ever made in my book.

So why didn’t I like this when I was young? Well I think that’s because I used to prefer the huge bombastic larger than life movies like The Man with the Golden Gun or A View to a Kill over the more serious spy movies such as Living Daylights or this whereas now I’ve done a 180 on all of those films. Secondly I think I just didn’t quite follow the plot properly honestly and even when I last watched it just prior to the release of Skyfall I still think I didn’t quite get it perfectly. Indeed it was only when I watched it again for this review that everything finally fell into place rather than me just enjoying the set pieces but being a little confused as to why the things on screen were happening.

This movie’s plot is complex. It throws you into a world of spies in Istanbul, where everybody is keeping tabs on everybody and espionage not only happens but is expected. When Bond first arrives he tells his driver that they are being followed, but the driver already knows this and is used to it. You are deep in this cold war between the East and West and I just love it. It feels like this world is real as if we are just watching one week’s events in Istanbul and the excitement we see could just be any other day to the locals. However with this complex world where Bulgarians are working with Russians who keeping tabs on the Turkish working for the British and SPECTRE is trying to play all sides off against each other you do need to pay attention. There is a scene where Bond says to his contact in Turkey, Ali Kerim Bey (played with amazing charm by Pedro Armendariz) that they need to tell Tatiana (Daniela Bianchi; voiced by Barbra Jefford) what day they are going to steal the Lektor from the Russian embassy and Kerim asks “the 13^th?” but Bond instead says the 14^th. I only just got that Bond told Tatiana the wrong day on purpose as he didn’t fully trust her and so he could steal it easier having given her the incorrect date rather than 007 just being superstitious about the number thirteen.

Although the plot is basically everyone chasing around a macguffin it’s so intricately well told and full of great locations and set pieces that you can’t help but be wrapped up in it. Some have criticized the gypsy camp scenes and thus the fight between the two girls as an unnecessary side-story, but I feel like it just adds flavour to the movie. I love the European setting in this film as not only does it differ so greatly from its predecessor but I just find all the Istanbul architecture so claustrophobic, like you believe spies could be hidden anywhere. I especially like the scene where Bond has agreed to meet Tatiana but is followed there by Grant and the Bulgarian guy into the cathedral while a tour is going on. With four people all with differing motivations it feels so dangerous and the location really enhances that feeling. Heck I didn’t even miss superb set designer Ken Adams who was absent for this film. You don’t need sets when the real locations are this good I suppose? But as much as I liked Istanbul the gypsy scene gives us a nice change and also provides us with our first good action set-piece in a Bond movie with the shoot-out.

The shoot-out is also when we get to hear the 007 Theme (not to be confused with the James Bond Theme) which I adore and really, really wish a new Bond movie would bring it back. It’s great that John Barry brought in a new theme, but he still relies way too heavy on Monty Norman’s Bond theme and he plays it it at rather random times instead of using it during exciting action scenes where it works best. Lionel Bart composed Matt Munro’s ‘From Russia with Love’, which again I simply love. I can’t quite say why but underneath all the espionage I feel there is a romantic aspect to this movie and Matt Munro’s crooner style really compliments that. Better still is the theme that plays over the title credits- starting with Barry’s short but brief ‘James Bond is Back’ then transitioning to the instrumental ‘From Russia with Love’ then into the ‘James Bond Theme’. It might just be my favourite Bond credits theme. The credits themselves are simply sublime with Robert Brownjohn (replacing Maurice Binder who briefly fell out with EON) having the frankly genius idea to project the credits onto the midriffs of belly dancers. If that alone doesn’t justify the gypsy scene then I don’t know what does.

Prior to the credits we get the pre-title sequence which gives us a fascinating look at the inner-workings of Spectre and a fake-out where it looks like Bond has been killed by Red Grant before revealing that the dead man was just wearing a 007 mask. How an Earth did they find a guy for that role? “So you want me to put on the mask while an assassin tries to get me as quick as possible….. This does sound dangerous, are you sure I’ll be fine?” We don’t actually get to see the real Bond until the 19^th minute which shows great restraint and it is to this film’s credit that we don’t miss him.

It’s often said that Goldfinger created the so-called “Bond formula” but really that all began here. This movie introduced the pre-title sequence, introduced Desmond Llewelyn as Q (though he still wasn’t referred to us such nor had any personality yet), gave us our first gadget, and perhaps his best ever, with the exploding briefcase, gave us a great villain in Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) with her infamous spiked shoe, a beautiful Bond girl and the best henchman in the series in my opinion with Robert Shaw’s Red Grant. Grant as the evil mirrored image of James Bond is superb, you believe he could have been a 00 agent had things worked out differently and I really like how’s kept in the shadows the whole movie, observing Bond and even saving his life during the gypsy gun battle, but not revealing himself until near the end. Grant also has the incredible fight with Bond on the Siberian Express train and after a decade of shaky-cam and terrible editing this fight looks even better today in 2017 appearing brutal and real. The fight is the movie’s highlight. They have tried to replicate the train fight at least five times in Bond movies, including the latest Spectre, and have had several a tall blonde henchman in the Red Grant style even more times and none compare to him or the fight.

Elsewhere in the cast Bernard Lee and Louis Maxwell are perfect as always and the part where Moneypenny overhears Bond telling Tatiana a salacious story about him and M in Tokyo before being cut off is sold expertly by Maxwell’s widening eyes. Armendariz gives so much life to Kerim, I want this guy to be my father, and he is my favourite ally Bond ever has. But of course as he’s an ally he has to die and this dath hurts you as well as 007. Vladek Sheybal is soooo creepy as Kronsteen he can make your skin crawl, Lotte’s Klebb despite being so short, is always an intimidating presence and Eunice Grayson is fun in her one scene as the returning Sylvia Trench. Sylvia was going to be a regular character as Bond’s lover before becoming the main Bond girl in a future movie but those plans were cut which I think is a bit of a shame as I’d take her over Tiffany Case in Diamonds are Forever. Walter Gottel makes his first appearance in a Bond movie, but not as the General Gogol character from the Moore movies but as a henchman and I never realised how tall he was or how menacing he could be. Lastly of course this movie introduces us to head of SPECTRE Ernst Staveo Blofeld, here just referred to as “#1” and played by Dr No’s Professor Dent Anthony Dawson. The faceless bad guy stroking a white Persian cat is so iconic and this is where it all began. The cat wasn’t a Flemming thing but was created for this movie and it’s a stroke (pun intended) of genius. This, along with Thunderball’s faceless Blofeld, are my favourite incarnations of Bond’s greatest enemy.

So From Russia with Love is a fantastic cold war spy thriller and a movie that set the template for the Bond formula set the standard for every future Bond film to aim and fail to achieve. It also is full of terrific action set-pieces including Bond being attacked (and Connery actually nearly killed) by a helicopter in a clear homage to North by Northwest.

10/10- It may not be my favourite 007 movie but objectively it is the best.

Best quote: “The mechanism is… Oh James. James, will you make love to me all the time in England?” “Day and night. Go on about the mechanism.”

Best scene: James Bond vs Red Grant on the train.

Kick-ass moment: Bond had been held up a gun point by Grant, mocked for knowing that you shouldn’t drink red wine with fish, and patronisingly called “Old man.” After killing Grant, Bond takes back his money saying “You won’t be needing this… old man.” Yeah!! Geez Grant, calling Bond old man?! He’s got 22 more films to come yet!

I’ll be going into 1964 with my next article but before I do so it’d be wrong not to at least mention another movie.

The Great Escape (1963)

Director: John Sturges

Starring: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasense, James Coburn, Gordon Jackson

From a barbed-wire camp to a barbed-wire country.

The Great Escape is not an action movie obviously but it is one of the most exciting movies I have ever seen so I was tempted to include it. It features an all-star cast, several of whom we’ll be seeing again in these reviews including Donald Pleasense, Gordon Jackson, Richard Attenborough and most notable Charles Bronson and of course Steve McQueen. I said before that Connery encapsulates cool so perfectly, well McQueen perhaps does so even more and along with the guy we’ll be talking about next time, is the coolest guy in cinema history. Here he turns up to a prisoner of war camp in casual clothes and baseball glove and nobody bats an eyelid because of how awesome he is. Then of course there’s the motorbike chase, which is why I am mentioning it, as while the rest of the film is a tense thriller that chase is pure action. McQueen requested the chase for his character and even played one of the Nazi’s chasing him at one point too. Of course the big stunt where his character Hilts jumps one of the two barbed-wire fences to freedom was done by stuntman Bud Ekins, but you know McQueen really wanted to do it himself. It’s a fantastic stunt and you are crushed when he fails to get over the second fence, but then when Hilts is captured and put into confinement once again and bounces his baseball of the cell walls you are uplifted again as you know that his spirit, and that of the allied forces, will never be broken.

10/10- if you haven’t see this movie please do. It’s one of my favourite films and is the UK’s favourite Boxing Day movie.

Next time in A Bloody Tomorrow the trifecta of coolest actors ever is complete as 'The Man with No Name' comes to town.