I had a very similar response to HORIZON, which I saw at the theater opening weekend. I was fully immersed in it and have been saddened by the general reaction to it, especially the unearned malice which most of the mainstream critics unleashed upon it.
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It really appears to have been malice.
Even if one does not like the film, one has to acknowledge how well made it is.
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THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM (1966)–on Blu-ray
Needing a movie last night, I reached for Harold Pinter, and ended up in West Berlin.
Michael Anderson proves to be a fine interpreter of a Pinter screenplay, even finding room for pauses and silences, which inflect the spy thriller genre, without abandoning it completely or distorting it to the point of meaninglessness. Pinter swaps out the novel’s British hero for an American one (George Segal as the most unusual spy in film history), and has Quiller going around making his presence known, rather than skulking in the shadows for clues. The baddies are neo-Nazis (still haunting the British imagination in the 1960s), and Pinter is an inspired choice to tackle this material. John Barry’s score was inspired by a comment to him by Pinter regarding the neo-Nazi aspect of the story.
Mise en scene is expressive, with Anderson not trying to enliven the terseness of the script’s language by reaching for the ornate/baroque. Pinteresque menace abounds, with henchmen always in the penumbra of the action. The stylization of the images matches that of the screenplay.
Performers handle Pinter’s dialogue well, while maintaining their characters’ genre identities. Oktober’s interrogation of Quiller brought to mind Goldberg and McCann of “The Birthday Party.”
An interior spy thriller (if there can be such a thing, this movie is its epitome) filmed in the exteriors of West Berlin, which, as depicted, is more no man’s land than lived-in city.
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You may want to give the companion piece to THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM a try, @MrKiddWint. Check out FUNERAL IN BERLIN, shot in the same year and directed by Guy Hamilton. They not only share the same stage, FUNERAL also inverts the theme.
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It is on my list Dustin. I think that FiB and THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN allowed Hamilton to gain experience with widescreen filmmaking, which he brought to a pinnacle with DAF.
Speaking of widescreen filmmaking:
Cahiers : What have you concluded from your experience with Cinemascope?
Hawks : We have spent a lifetime learning how to compel the public to concentrate on one single thing. Now we have something that works in exactly the opposite way, and I don’t like it very much. I like Cinemascope for a picture such as The Land of the Pharaohs, where it can show things impossible otherwise, but I don’t like it at all for the average story. Contrary to what some think, it is easier to shoot in Cinemascope – you don’t have to bother about what you should show – everything’s on the screen. I find that a bit clumsy. Above all, in a motion picture, is the story. You cannot shoot a scene as quickly in Cinemascope, because if you develop a situation quickly, the characters jump all over the wide screen – which in a way makes them invisible. Thus you lose speed as a means of exciting or augmenting a scene’s dramatic tension. You have to proceed differently. What you lose on the dramatic plane, however, you gain on the visual plane. The result can be very pleasing to the eye. You have to decide what seems best.
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Oh, Mr. Hawks, only careless directors don’t bother.
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HOUR OF THE GUN (1967) – streaming
More correctly, ONE HOUR AND 40 MINUTES OF MANY GUNS, HOTG is John Sturges’ acme for me. The critic/scholar Fredrik Gustafsson has noted that in this film Sturges achieves peak abstraction–only necessary characters are in the frame–streets and towns are deserted (as far back as BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, Sturges had insisted on using no extras, but rather just the characters necessary for the plot).
Complementing Sturges’ abstraction, Edward Anhalt’s script is obligingly terse/laconic, and the performances demonstrate an across-the-board restraint that renders the inevitable eruptions of emotion all the more powerful. I was particularly struck by the deft and nuanced acting of James Garner. His Wyatt Earp is an amalgam of small gestures, where other actors would have gone large. As for Jason Robards–his Doc Holliday is a Eugene O’Neill character transplanted to a Hollywood Western. Robert Ryan (is he ever bad?) is Ike Clanton as respectable land baron monster.
As often with Sturges, this is a world of men–a nurse has one line in the final scene, and there are some female entertainers in the background of a street fight (they are held back from emerging from the saloon where they work).
A revisionist Western? Maybe, but while Sturges said he wanted to tell the story of the O.K. Corral gunfight with greater accuracy this time (he hated the Hal Wallis treatment he had filmed ten years earlier), HOTG is more a film where Sturges’ aesthetic was given free reign, and achieved its richest expression. How daring to start the film with the fight at the O.K. Corral, and then proceed to show 100 minutes of increasingly violent acts through the most temperate mise en scene.
Sturges depicts the power of violence, as well as the costs it extracts from those who use it. Along with the gunfights, there are courtroom battles, and discussions of the use–proper and improper-- of the law to achieve desired ends (along with the direct and effective deployment of wealth to buy what is wanted).
Yet the film never becomes cynical. HOTG is less a sensationalist/elegiac revision of the genre (think Peckinpah), than a thoughtful deepening of the usual Western tropes, bringing out strains of melancholy and regret, which are presented in muted, abstract ways.
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It’s an extraordinary film. Probably my second favourite Strurges nest to Bad Day at Black Rock. Robards is my favourite Doc Holiday and Garner is superb … Must give it a re watch
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For me, the order is reversed, but they are both superb. THE SATAN BUG, as nutty as it is, is in third place for the beauty of its mise-en-scene. If only it had an (even mildly) coherent plot. The Blu-ray is lovely though.
He is amazing–like a conscience that haunts Earp. My favorite scene is when Holliday confronts Brocius in the street. Brocius says “I’m drunk,” and Holliday responds “So am I.” Robards is well-nigh perfect in that moment.
I had started the evening watching ICE STATION ZEBRA, but that turned out to be too (Le)grand for me,so I bailed and dialed up HOTG. Most Sturges’ movies have at least one or two great scenes, but sometimes he buries his instinct for abstraction in ornamentation.
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Thank you for mentioning this most excellent film. I agree it is one of the best of the 90s, but I have to admit I did not know it was a Peter Weir directed movie–one of my favorite directors. Now I’m off to find it on my streaming services…been too long!
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IF
I thought I would hate it, roll my eyes at the forced emotions and cheap tricks to generate sentiment.
Yet I was hooked very fast and laughed and cried.
A true feel good movie.
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Yeah, well, it’s hat-eating time for me again because I watched this one once more now, being in a kind of Apes rule the world-kind of mood, and now I actually love this film and consider it one of the finest of the series.
What happened? Perspective, I‘d say.
While I got turned off by the tons of CGI before I now really focused on the storytelling. And once again a „Planet of the Apes“-movie is a rather prescient commentary on the tribal politics of our time, featuring a self-appointed king whose eager to please brutes enslave their own kind and use the past for their own disinformation purposes.
And once I got over the CGI I even could appreciate the magnificent cinematography and the slow pacing of the 70‘s.
So, munch munch, I love this film now.
And I‘m looking forward to the continuation of this story, with the bitter ending poignantly showing the human race gearing up again to make the same mistakes as before.
But that’s our problem, right? Never learning from the past.
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I saw Gladiator 2 on Saturday in 4DX. It is by no means the instant classic that the first one was, with Paul Mezcal’s Lucius merely adequate compared to Russel Crowe’s iconic Maximus, but what an absolutely fun romp it was!!!
It’s as if they decided to abandon any slight pretext of historical accuracy and instead went full on Spinal Tap and turned the ridiculous dial up to 11 just because… sharks in an arena fight are cool… and so is a rhinoceros… and weird devil baboon hybrids for that matter.! The 4DX treatment was magnificent, even though I was nearly catapulted from my chair on one occasion like the contents of an ancient ballista! I would wholeheartedly recommend!
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Ransom
I will watch this 1975 Connery thriller about a plane hijacking soon because I have never seen it yet, nor could I find it on any streaming service - but at least our German friends can now get it for 4,99 EUR as a digital copy from Prime Video or Apple.tv, should you be interested.
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HOW TO DIAL A MURDER (1978)–streaming
An episode from the last season of “Columbo,” it is one of the most organic/coherent examples of episodic television from that period that I know. I remember seeing it when it first aired, and it has always stayed in mind. I was happy to see it still has juice. Its director, James Frawley, would go on to direct THE MUPPET MOVIE the following year.
In some ways, it is like THE GODFATHER, CODA: THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE. Both films are fine works, and have all the requisite pleasures to be enjoyed as stand-alone creations, but it is undeniable that a viewer needs to know the templates from which they spring to enjoy them at the highest/most comprehensive level.
Among the pleasures:
- James Frawley’s direction is excellent. The episode moves along at a good pace, and the images do not bore the eye.
- 73-minute running time–no filler
- We get to watch Columbo detect, as he discovers clues and builds his theory of the crime. No colleagues who need to be bantered with.
- Good performance from Nicol Williamson. Dr. Eric Mason is the epitome of control, and Williamson gives an appropriately icy performance that has hints of thaw/fracturing. Mason is not a pleasant killer that a viewer can feel for/sympathize with, but this episode is all about the game, its playing, and maintaining control. Mason’s arrogance after having gotten away with one murder, makes him both careless about his second, and confident that he will not be caught. He is in control of the narrative.
- Great score from Patrick Williams.
- Good sound design, creatively utilizing sounds/music to connect/transition scenes.
- The battle is engaged from the moment Columbo meets Mason. We are in Season 7, and the template is well-established, so there is room for some abstraction, and dispensing with the usual opening rituals of Columbo-perpetrator engagement.
- This abstraction also allows Columbo to fortuitously/magically appear in scenes that begin as what seem to be Mason-only scenes. The game has been engaged, and Mason will not shake Columbo until there is a victor. While a viewer can complain that this is not realistic (it isn’t), it supports the larger aesthetic of the episode: to employ an expression from a later time and culture, the episode’s Columbo-perpetrator encounters are a great example of game recognizing game.
Conclusion: the episode is an example of strong formal technical elements/execution (not as common in 1970s television as they are today) combining with excellent writing and acting to deliver a satisfying whole–one suffused with a poetic/aesthetic ethos of “enjoying the pleasure of the game.”
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This was always the episode that I remembered as the most exciting and also with an almost perfect murder, having your dogs attack the victim on command over the telephone. Let’s prove that! I also always liked all the movie references.
After all these years, I was a bit disappointed when I watched it again recently, because after the murder, which I still thought was brilliant, it is not very exciting. Actually, the ending is also a bit bland and dragging its feet, because if he hadn’t sent the dogs after Columbo, there wouldn’t be much to prove that he was behind the murder.
Williamson is like always very good as the murderer, I always love to see him in a movie, he’s still my favorite Merlin (Excallibur, 1981).
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The episode which I realy thought was as good as I remembered is “Try & Catch Me” with Ruth Gordon, who is briljant as a crime/detective writer and she seems to be the oldest actor who ever played a murderer in Columbo, she was 80 while acting in this episode.
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Agreed. We see Columbo doing basic detective work, which became a less common sight over the years (and is not particularly exciting), and the episode has a generally flat affect. Now, I am using “flat” in a non-pejorative sense here. Dr. Eric Mason is all about control, and the episode featuring him is correspondingly controlled in terms of narrative, imagery, and, especially, Columbo/killer confrontations. No anger/humor/teasing/needling/outbursts. Columbo knows (in my reading) that if he were to up the ante as he had done with past perpetrators, it would only strengthen Mason’s resolve not to be controlled. He would say his secret control word (which must be Rosebud) to himself, and not let Columbo get to him.
And Columbo must get to him, since it is only by making Mason reveal that he knows the attack command that Columbo can nail him. Columbo’s ultimate diss–“I must say I found you disappointing. I mean, your incompetence. And for a man of your intelligence, sir, you got caught in a lot of stupid lies”–is delivered in as placid a tone as possible.
It works. Much like Oliver Brandt in “The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case,” Mason has to show Columbo how it was done, and give the Lieutenant the “complete package.” Columbo has out-controled him, which Mason admits when he acknowledges that Columbo has been in control since the beginning, a realization that Mason is only now coming to.
Columbo disavows taking any of the doctor’s classes or knowing his techniques. He just asserts his love for “the pleasure of the game,” and in this episode of the game, Columbo had to be more controlled than the killer he was trying to catch.
A fine episode. I find Season 7 to be strong overall (many disagree), and I think one of the reasons is that Richard Alan Simmons took over as producer starting with the “Bye-Bye Sky High” episode at the end of the previous season. He and Falk were pals, and Simmons brought a new sensibility, which freshened the series, and seemed to reinvigorate Falk.
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It’s my favorite season, I almost remembered all of the episodes.
By the way I have the same response as I have with the “Dial for Murder” episode as I have with the final of the “Bye Bye Sky High” episode. I understand why the murdere has to show Columbo how it was realy done, but I also find it to easy to get the murderer, otherwise Columbo could never have proved and catched him.
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Later episodes tended to rely more on Columbo tricking the killer into revealing themselves, while earlier episodes relied more on the discovery of a mistake made at the time of the murder (an approach which tends to lead to more active viewing. Will we see the mistake before Columbo reveals it?).
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