Push the button, Max.
This big-budget, globe-trotting comedy is almost exactly as old as I am and I’ve always held a warm place in my affections for it. It’s not quiet or subtle, but it is spirited, like a Clydesdale that thinks it’s a quarter horse.
Wen they do you in, pray it’s somebody who knows where to shoot…
Sergio Leone’s follow-up to the “Man With No Name” film trilogy was probably not what anyone expected, but international audiences seemed better able to cope with the surprise than their American counterparts. Once Upon a Time in the West initially bombed in the States despite being a smash hit overseas. Only in retrospect have we conferred upon this film its proper status as a unique classic, as different from the director’s previous work as it was from the more traditional Hollywood conventions it inverted at the same time it was playing homage to them.
I don’t want to be rich and respectable. I want to be just like the rest of you.
The Sons of Katie Elder looks epic in the sweeping vistas of its Mexican locations and its large cast of characters, but it doesn’t feel epic in the scope of its story. Its two-hour length is more than enough to contain its narrative, with a solid twenty minutes to spare. It’s not a bad movie so much as a decent one that takes its sweet time getting to the point.
Fill your hand you son of a bitch!
Don’t be deceived by the fact that John Wayne received an Oscar for his performance as Rooster Cogburn. That award was probably more of a lifetime achievement award than recognition for a single performance, much like Paul Newman’s Oscar for The Color of Money. John Wayne had given better performances and made better films. Probably not coincidentally, John Ford was usually involved.
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
While John Ford would go on to direct several more pictures after this one, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance represents a sort of exclamation point of one of most celebrated directorial careers in American film. His previous high-water mark, The Searchers, was a film torn between the conventions of a previous era and emerging modern sensibilities. Liberty Valance is thoroughly modern by 1962 standards and virtually timeless by any other.
He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.
It’s best to think of this movie as the estranged fraternal twin of Dr. Strangelove. Fail Safe is the sober, humorless one. Both films cover virtually the same territory, that of an inadvertent nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, but while Stanley Kubrick treated Armageddon as a subject worthy of absurdist gallows farce, Sidney Lumet takes it seriously for some reason. (more…)
You got something against the English language, Colonel?
Directed by John Frankenheimer, this film teams with his masterpiece The Manchurian Candidate to form a potent one-two punch of Cold War paranoia. The earlier film, with Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, boasted a more complex plot and a layer of political satire that’s not found here. That doesn’t make Seven Days in May a lesser film, just a different one with different goals. (more…)
Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!
Stanley Kubrick’s acid-soaked absurdist farce about the end of the world has to stand alone among the genre of cold war films in the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey stands alone among science-fiction films. (more…)
That is precisely the reaction I would have expected from a man of your obvious limitations.
Back when I was a kid, this movie used to play on the Saturday afternoon movie about every third week and, being a boy with a jones for all things aviation, I ate it up. Of course, back then I simply got off on the idea of turning a crashed airplane into a new smaller airplane. As I got older, I came to appreciate the movie for what it was: a deeply insightful drama about men under crisis, couched in the format of an action adventure.
They’ll ruin him. They’ll make a man out of him.
The Jungle Book was the last Disney animated film in which Walt Disney had any direct involvement. It’s probably not a coincidence that it also marked the end of the first real “Golden Age” of classical animated features from the House of the Mouse.
While the studio would continue to produce other cell-animated movies over the next twenty years, no one was ever going to confuse The Aristocats and The Rescuers for Pinocchio. It wouldn’t be until The Little Mermaid in 1989 that Disney would really reclaim its animated mojo.
I thought she was a sandwich ‘til she went spare on me hand.
With the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night
This is 1918. Things have changed.
The dazzling flying sequences in this movie are worth the price of admission all by themselves. This is a good thing because the story is nothing to write home about. Much like its contemporaries, Grand Prix and The Battle of Britain, The Blue Max presents a somewhat shallow, sudsy story set against a beautifully photographed backdrop of aerial combat in World War I. You’ll remember this movie for those scenes (and scenes of Ursula Andress barely wearing a towel) long after you’ve forgotten what the whole thing was all about.
