Flickers in Time

The Wild Angels
Directed by Roger Corman
Written by Peter Bogdanovich and Charles B. Griffith
1966/USA
American International Pictures
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Heavenly Blues: We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! … And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we are gonna do. We are gonna have a good time… We are gonna have a party.[/box]

Totally over-the-top biker movie starring some of the future’s best actors.

The Wild Angels motorcycle gang is clearly based on the Hells Angels, whose members participated as extras.  The gang is under the leadership of Heavenly Blue (Peter Fonda) and “Mama” Mike (Nancy Sinatra).  Heavenly Blue, Mike, best friend “Loser” (Bruce Dern), and Loser’s girlfriend Gaysh (Diane Ladd) head off to the Coachella Valley to retrieve Loser’s bike from some Mexicans who stole it.  Lots of brawling, partying, drug use, and general anti-establishment behavior ensue.  With Michael J. Pollard as a gang member.

I had to see this as most of it is set close to where I live.  The movie is really quite fun from the horrible acting to the surf music sound track.  Bruce Dern chews the scenery with great relish.  Hard to believe that he would become a staple in Hollywood.  Go for it if the genre appeals.

Fun trivia:  Dern and then-wife Diane Ladd conceived daughter actress Laura Dern during the making of this picture.

Le dieuxieme souffle (“Second Wind”)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
Written by Jean-Pierre Melville and José Giovanni from a novel by Giovanni
1966/France
Les Productions Montaigne
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] It so happens that the gangster story is a very suitable vehicle for the particular form of modern tragedy called film noir, which was born from American detective novels. It’s a flexible genre. You can put whatever you want into it, good or bad. And it’s a fairly easy vehicle to use to tell stories that matter to you about individual freedom, friendship, or rather human relationships, because they’re not always friendly. Or betrayal, one of the driving forces in American crime novels. — Jean-Pierre Melville[/box]

A brutal, detailed, and realistic late French noir.  Worth watching, despite its length.

Gustave (“Gu”) Minda (Lino Ventura) is a notorious French criminal.  He is the lone survivor of an audacious prison escape with two fellow inmates.  He heads for Paris where he meets up with lover Manouche and former criminal associates.  Shots soon ring out in her restaurant and what will be a high body count begins to mount.

Police inspector Commissaire Blot (Paul Meurisse) is on the case and has solved it from first glance.  But it seems he doesn’t mind too much if underworld rivals continue to rub each other out.  Gu goes into hiding in Marseilles and eventually is taken on as the fourth in the holdup of a platinum transport.  As usual, the anti-hero vows one last job and never to return to prison.  Plenty of double crosses on the way to the explosive finale.

Melville creates a striking sense of realism while telling his tale of “honor” among thieves and its betrayal.  The acting is fantastic.  Love Blot!  I think I might have liked it better had the screenwriters picked up the pace but recommend it nonetheless to fans of the genre or director.

The investigation begins

This Property Is Condemned
Directed by Sidney Pollock
Written by Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Coe, and Edith Summer suggested by a one-act play by Tennessee Williams
1966/USA
Paramount Pictures/Seven Arts Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Alva Starr: New Orleans is certainly not a place where a person needs to feel the pain of separation for long.[/box]

One of the last of the Tennessee-Williams Southern-fried psychodramas of this period.  Williams disowned the film.  Still watchable though.

The story is framed by a conversation between Willy Starr (Mary Badham) and a local  boy about what happened to her sister Alva.  Alva (Natalie Wood) is one of those dreamy poetic Tennessee Williams heroines in the tradition of Blanche DuBois.  Her domineering mother (Kate Reid) sees her beauty as a meal ticket for the whole family and tries to pimp her out to a middle-aged train conductor with an invalid wife.  Others interested in Alva Include Sidney (Robert  Blake) and even mom’s boyfriend J.J. Nichols (Charles Bronson).

But Alva falls hard and fast for Owen Ligate (Robert Redford) who has arrived in town to close down the railroad station on which all depend.  Owen eventually reciprocates.  But mama has other ideas.

The acting in this is swell as is James Wong Howe’s cinematography.  It just kind of feels like an erzatz version of what we have seen before several times.

Fantastic Voyage
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Written by Harry Kleiner; adapted by David Duncan from a story by Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby
1966/USA
Twentieth Century Fox
Repeat viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Col. Donald Reid: A woman has no place on a mission of this size![/box]

This sci-fi classic is not as fantastic as I remember from my youth.  Still pretty cool for its time.

A defecting scientist develops a blood clot in the brain.  In the not so distant future, a submarine and its crew are miniaturized to sub-microbe size and injected into the carotid artery from which there is a direct route to the brain.  When there they will destroy the clot with a laser.  But there is the threat of treachery from within and the patient’s physiology throws a monkey wrench into the works.  Can the crew complete its mission within the 60 minutes before they start growing and are destroyed by the body’s immune system?  With Stephen Boyd, Raquel Welch, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Pleasance, and Arthur O’Connell.

This movie is all about its concept and its special effects.  Certainly it wasn’t going to win any awards for acting or dialogue.  Now the effects appear pretty cheesy but in the movie theater they were magic to my eyes.  Fleischer keep things moving along.  All in all, it’s a an entertaining romp.

Fantastic Voyage won Academy Awards in the categories of Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color and Best Effects, Special Visual Affects.  It was nominated in the categories of Best Cinematography, Color; Best Film Editing and Best Effects, Sound Effects.

Funeral in Berlin
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Written by Evan Jones from a novel by Len Deighton
1966/UK
Jovera Pictures AG/SA/Lowndes Productions Limited
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Harry Palmer: We get plenty of Russians. It’s a pity you’re not Chinese.[/box]

Some snappy dialogue and the gorgeous young Michael Caine make this a fairly entertaining mid-sixties spy movie.

Harry Palmer (Caine) is a thief turned British secret service agent.  He is assigned to help retiring East German official Col. Stok (Oskar Homolka) defect to the West across the Wall.  Palmer doubts the Colonel’s sincerity as he carries on with the task at hand.  Will he become caught up in a deadly game?  Of course he will.

This aims for kind of a middle ground between the Bond films and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and but lacks the excitement of the former and the tension of the latter.  It’s OK entertainment though and I could happily watch this era Caine in much worse films than this.  Such a treat to see Homolka still up to his old tricks!

Mademoiselle
Directed by Tony Richardson
Written by Marguerite Duras; story by Jean Genet
1966/UK/France
Procinex/Woodfall Film Productions
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] The serial arsonist is the most difficult to apprehend because the evidence is burned up. Joseph Wambaugh [/box]

Despite Jeanne Moreau’s great performance, this was ultimately just a downer as far as I was concerned.

“Mademoiselle”( Moreau) is the highly respectable and very evil school teacher in a French village.  Practically from the first frame it is clear that she delights in death and destruction and is responsible for a series of fires, a flood and water poisoning afflicting the local farmers.  But the townspeople are sure a hunky Italian itinerate logger (Ettore Manni) is responsible.  Mademoiselle  becomes infatuated with the handsome young womanizer.

This film takes a very dim view of humanity and not in a blackly comic way.  It was not for me.

Clip

Zontar: The Thing from Venus
Directed by Larry Buchanan
Written by Hilman Taylor and Larry Buchanan
1966USA
Azalea Pictures
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Keith Ritchie: The world is full of facts.[/box]

This grade Z TV movie is an absolute hoot from its absurdly expository dialogue to its ridiculous creature.

Rocket scientist Keith Ritchie has invented a way of communicating with Venus via laser beams.  Venusian Zontar has Ritchie convinced that he is on his way to save Earthlings from themselves and initiate a new age of world peace.  Zontar plans to establish control by sending drones to take over the bodies and minds of community leaders.  Too late, Keith begins to doubt the benevolence of his monster buddy’s plans.  John Agar appears as an elder scientist.

American International Pictures commissioned schlockmeister Larry Buchanan to remake Roger Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956) to fill out a TV package deal and this little gem was the result  The tiny budget is evident in every shot.  The actors labor with dialogue that might have come from a Popular Science magazine or is so silly you can only laugh.  And laugh you will if you approach this very lame movie in the right frame of mind.  No riff track necessary.

The Sand Pebbles
Directed by Robert Wise
Written by Robert Anderson from a novel by Richard McKenna
1966/USA
Argyle Productions/Solar Productions/Robert Wise Productions/Twentieth Century Fox
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Jake Holman: Hello, Engine; I’m Jake Holman.[/box]

Despite all its accolades, this grouchy viewer found The Sand Pebbles to be a 3-hour snooze-fest punctuated by episodes of cruelty and racial violence.  Not my cup of tea at all.

The year is 1926 and the setting is a tributary of the Yangtse River in China.  Revolution is in the air.  The Great Powers are still attempting gunboat diplomacy.  Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) is an engineer in the U.S. Navy whose whole life is engines.  He is looking forward to serving on an older gunboat where he can be his own boss.  He finds out too late that crazy Captain Collins (Richard Crenna) has hired Chinese coolies to perform all the manual labor on board.  All the Americans on board are supposed to be available for the ship’s military mission should it ever have one.  The coolie in charge of the engine room tries to sabotage Jake.

Eventually, that coolie is killed and Jake is forced to train another Chinese to take his place.   Po-han (Mako) and Jake eventually become friends. Po-han pays dearly for this.  Jake has a tentative romance with a schoolteacher (Candice Bergen) who works in a missionary compound up river. In the meantime, shipmate Frenchy (Richard Attenborough) falls in love with a Chinese virgin who his being held for sale to the highest bidders.  The local population becomes more and more hostile to the American presence.   I’ll stop there.

Within the first 15-minutes of this film it was clear that Wise was as interested in making a travelogue as in making an action movie.  So we get a lot of beautiful scenery that does not advance the action.  On top of that, Steve McQueen is forced to act a lot with his face.  This is not his forte.  We spend many minutes watching him explore the engine while contemplating something or other.  The action picks up whenever the Chinese enter the picture.  Unfotunately, they are usually being subjected to cruel treatment.  I’m not big on watching that kind of thing either.  So it wasn’t for me.  Jerry Goldsmith’s score is a thing of beauty, however.

The Sand Pebbles was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of: Best Picture; Best Actor; Best Supporting Actor (Mako); Best Cinematography, Color; Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color; Best Sound; Best Film Editing; and Best Music, Original Score.

Walk, Don’t Run
Directed by Charles Walters
Written by Sol Saks based on a story by Robert Russell and Frank Ross
1966/US
Sol C. Siegel Productions
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Christine Easton: After 7:45, you can have the bathroom all day if you’d like.

Sir William Rutland: I wouldn’t know what to do in the bathroom all day![/box]

Cary Grant’s final film is a remake of 1943’s The More the Merrier with Grant in the Charles Coburn part.  The earlier film is classic, this one is fairly fun.

Christine Easton (Samantha Eggar) works at the British Embassy in Tokyo.  She considered it her patriotic duty to offer up her apartment to share during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  She had intended to attract a female roommate but industrialist Sir William Rutland (Grant), who has arrived two days before his hotel reservation, muscles himself in.   Shortly thereafter, Rutland meets and takes a liking to young American architect and Olympic compeititor  Steve Davis (Jim Hutton) and agrees to share wis room with him.  When he finds out Christine is engaged to an awful diplomat, he starts matchmaking.

There was a time in the mid-60’s when the Code was gone and mainstream filmmakers took the opportunity to get slightly racy with their content.  Oftentimes as here, the result is double entendres that just feel icky somehow.  An example is the long conversation between Grant and Hutton about whether Eggar “has … ” or not.  The movie is also filled with unfunny jabs at the Soviets.  But. still, there’s Grant as suave as ever and he has some funny physical business to do.  As a bonus, we get to hear him hum the theme songs from Charade and An Affair to Remember!

Unused theme song – love this! – feels like summer