Films featuring
Sean Connery

A Bridge Too Far

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★★★★★[/types]]

Patton will lead the assault. I would prefer Montgomery, but even Eisenhower isn’t that stupid.

This movie serves as both an unofficial sequel and thematic bookend to The Longest Day. It has an undeserved reputation for being overlong, ponderous and dull. It’s none of those things but I can understand how it could appear that way to people expecting a more conventional war movie.

A Bridge Too Far details, at great length and in exacting detail, the Allied debacle known as Operation Market Garden, an over-ambitious plan by General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery to end World War II by Christmas, 1944, by kicking down the undefended back door of Germany. The main problem with the battle plan was that it depended entirely on Murphy’s Law being repealed. Continue reading →

The Longest Day

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★★★★★[/types]]

Darryl Zanuck’s multi-national epic occasionally plays like an academic lecture on the events of June 5 and 6, 1944, albeit an interesting lecture with some really cool film. The Longest Day covers the first twenty-four hours of the invasion of France from American, British, French and German perspectives, employing separate directors for each nationality and shooting in the native languages of those involved. This gives the film a level of authenticity that was fairly atypical of war movies of the time.

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The Hunt for Red October

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★★★★★[/types]]

How quickly did we leave the Cold War behind? The dust had barely settled on the fall of the Berlin Wall when this 1990 Tom Clancy adaptation was treating the subject like a period film. Of course, the world had changed so drastically since the novel’s 1984 publication that it was impossible to view the material as current events.

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Wrong is Right

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★★★★★[/types]]

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Wrong is Right bills itself as comedy, but it works better as a mediocre spy thriller with occasional bursts of humor. It largely fails as a comedy because, for the most part, it’s often hard to tell at what they were aiming their humor. As political satire, it’s too broad and too tame to be effective.

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Marnie

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★★★★★[/types]]

Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage.” With Alfred Hitchcock, you might rephrase that to “Most of the world is a soundstage.” The director had a rather agoraphobic approach to filmmaking, preferring the controlled environment of the set whenever possible. However, in a time of films like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and even the new James Bond movies, when audiences were accustomed to seeing actors performing against the backdrop of real, exotic locales, the seams of Hitchcock’s stage-bound style were beginning to show. Never was this more apparent then in his 1964 film Marnie, especially with the obvious painted backdrop behind the street where Bernice Edgars lives.

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