Quentin Tarantino likes this film but his taste is a little suss on this period, he can't resist TV movie style entertainment and B listers. I should love it - a guys on a mission story to get some cannons, George Peppard, Pancho Villa era.
But it takes forever to get going. I thought they'd start with the mission but then there's an attack then they go, like more than 30 mins in. The characters are all the same. There's a girl. There's some guy. Another guy. Peppard. Peppard detours with hookers. Big moments have no impact like the girl betraying someone and a member of the team who wants revenge on Peppard for letting his brother die and the deaths of the others.
5 comments:
Insanely prolific TV writer Stephen Kandel took a break from cranking out teleplays to write the CORDOBA screenplay on spec. In an interview fifteen years later he explained, "I wrote a terrific script, he said. I say it was a terrific script because two studios were bidding for it. I wasn't hired to write it; I just wrote it. And then I went through a year and a half of hell in the process of making a really terrible movie. A year and a half. It turned out to be a butchered, bad movie, and I had a lousy experience..." And he went back to television.
Another Kandel script that Tarantino likes is the 1975 TV movie DEATH STALK, which starts off as a bad DELIVERANCE rip-off and eventually ends with some weird sexual politics.
Fantastic! Do you have a full copy of that interview? I'd love to know more about him. Even if just a link.
It's in a book called _Off Camera: Conversations with the Makers of Prime-time Television_ by Richard Levinson and William Link (New American Library, 1986)
Here's a link to a text file of the interview: https://od.lk/d/NjZfNTkyNTM1MzRf/KANDEL%20interview.txt
Post a Comment