What Movie Have You Seen Today?

General General Movie Discussion
2416

I’m quite conflicted about the film, really. On the one hand, I like Marvin and Moore, the cinematography is quite good and it’s always nice just to see Roger in a film that’s not marred by utter ineptitude behind the camera. But yeah, there’s plenty of reasons not to love it, as well.

Roger seemed to have a knack for self-sabotage. I recently re-read his LALD “Diaries” and you can tell he was pleased that the Bond role was starting to open doors for him, with offers pouring in. But even at the height of his Bond-powered box-office clout, he just kept picking projects that were either fatally flawed at their core or should have been obviously unsavable even at script stage.

Big names, money and talent obviously went into “Shout At The Devil,” “Gold” and “The Wild Geese,” but they start with a strike against them with the stubborn decision to film in South Africa at the height of apartheid (if Roger somehow couldn’t have anticipated the complaints raised about that the first time, surely he must have caught on by the third). All three films have their merits, but in the end what must have looked to Roger like chances to elevate himself to the levels of his A-list co-stars end up remembered more as “A-listers go slumming with Roger Moore.”

“Escape to Athena” is another head-scratcher. WW2 period piece “caper” movies were a fairly bankable sub-genre in the 70s, but Roger opts to play a Nazi officer?! The limited exposure to his “German accent” on The Saint not being enough punishment, now we get two hours of it? Of course he ends up a hero of sorts by the end, but if “elephant poacher” is a hard hurdle to clear in the “lovable rogue” sweepstakes, “Nazi Major” is even worse.

I really want to love anything with Roger in it, but he seems to have been his own worst enemy when it came to career choices. Some of these films did fairly well financially, but in general they do not age well and consequently are largely forgotten.

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2417

What I read sometime ago about it is that elephants realy were shot but that it were animals which would be shot anyway. I can’t remember why, maybe to control the amount of animals or something, but since I read this, it feels more than akward to watch a scene in which “our heroes” are killing elephants, I just don’t want to watch it. It feels not okay.

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2418

I was looking for signs that the elephant shootings were “archival” or documentary footage, but it doesn’t appear so. My wife pointed out that elephants are indeed trainable, but I don’t know if they can be trained to fall down like they’ve been pole-axed. I also considered the possibility they were shot with tranquilizers, but somehow I never imagined the results being so immediate.

Interesting to consider they could have been elephants who “would have been shot anyway,” but that would still make the opening placard (“no animals were harmed”) a lie.

It’s the kind of thing that might have passed for “manly” in an old Clark Gable or John Wayne film in the 30s or 40s, but it definitely leaves a bad taste in this one. Herein lies the real danger of “period” films: either you present your characters with the attitudes of the time – which are often repellant to us today – or you sanitize them by grafting on modern values and attitudes, which makes them feel false and contrived and agenda-driven.

And – spoiler alert – the heroes end up losing all the harvested ivory when their boat is sunk anyway, which makes it all seem even more pointless and grim.

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