Movie review - "The Sweet Ride" (1968) **

 Interesting. Odd. 20th Century Fox's attempt to jump on the beach craze came out late, was serious, had a middle aged star (Tony Franciosa) and adult plots but had some young talent, notably Jacqueline Bisset (inexperienced but gorgeous), Michael Sarrazin (pretty but blank with nothing to play), Bob Denver. Franciosa ensures someone can act. It's super serious despite the presence of Denver and being produced by Joe Pasternak. There's a bike gang but it's serious.

Tom Mankiewicz wrote the script which is full of zingers, not many funny.  It's not a comedy it's a drama with zingers. I think they were going for a big screen Peyton Place with some beach tropes.

Harvey Hart tilts the camera and a few other things. I wasn't sure if Sarrazin assaulted Bisset, who I think was into masochistic sex or something. There's these random characters like Bisset's producer (she's an actress) and Denver's girfriend Michele Carey and a biker guy and a cop. 

Movie is confusing. It's called a programmer but what's its genre?  

Movie review - "The Deep" (1977) **1/2 (re-watching)

 My memories of seeing it as a kid remain. Jacqueline Bisset in the shirt. The voodoo torture. The cricket match. The brutal murder of a friend. Spooky underwater stuff.

Lacks interesting characters. The actors are there but couldn't they have more to play. Couldn't they have given Jacqueline Bisset something to do? All she does is get attacked, look great when damp, and make a suggestion about a woman in ancient times.

Really Robert Shaw's character should have been killed before act three like he was in Jaws.

Lovely music. Great locations.

Movie review - "The Knack... and How to Get It" (1965) **1/2

 One of the main films of swinging London, this has plenty of life and energy - Richard Lester at his "happening" peak, with Charles Wood having adapted Ann Jellicoe's play, and some ideal actors like Michael Crawford as the geek who is determined to to learn how to pick up chicks from his mate Ray Brook. Rita Tushingham is excellent as the main girl. Jackie Bisset, Jane Birkin and Charlotte Rampling make their debuts.

The whole rape subplot - Brook seems to rape Tushingham, she says he raped her - goes on a lot and feels very disasteful. This won the Palm d'Or?

Great visuals.

Movie review - "Secrets" (1971) **

Philip Saville, who directed this as well as providing the original story, earned his reputation making TV plays and this is like a TV play - serious, a bit pretentious, a series of two handers, a look at infidelity.

It's best remembered for Jacqueline Bisset's nude scene - and it's a dull movie so around twenty minutes in that's what you look forward to because there's not much going on.

It feels dodgy. It's one day in the life of a small family. Bisset and husband Robert Powell have a fight. She gets picked up in the park by a scruffy Scandinavian with a massive car phone. Maybe in real life Per Oscarssn was a stud muffin but to be frank he doesn't seem hot enough to Jackie B. Yet being a total stranger harassing her in the park seems to work - she goes to his place, he tells her about his dead wife, she dresses up as her, and they do it, and she has a topless orgasm, which is hot.

Meanwhile she's left her young daughter at the laundromat. She hangs out with the gardener and plants a kiss on him and he kind of responds then stops.

Robert Powell goes for an interview as a computer programmer and flirts with interviewee Shirley Knight. Or at least she seems to want to bonk him. That subplot was awful. so was the quasi pedophilia. That left Jackie Bi having afternoon sex.

It's meant to be significant. Saville went out with Diana Rigg for a long time - I think he was very good at charming stunningly attractive actresses into doing things.

Movie review - "Day for Night" (1973) **** (warning: spoilers)

 Popular Truffaut movie goes down easy - I think everyone likes this, especially film people. Full of touches like Truffaut playing a director and Jacqueline Bisset as a movie star, and the composer playing himself and the director receiving parcels of movie books.

Like a lot of Truffaut it ambles along. The death of a key character is described off screen. The movie they're making seems terrible.

I enjoyed how Truffaut's director character didn't really care about anything except finishing the film - if people had breakdowns he shrugs them off. I feel in real life Truffaut would be more of a sex pest but the character he plays here is accurate.

Nathalie Baye as a crew member gets all these close ups and action towards the end of the film. It's endearing in a way. Bisset is great value, brings star commitment.  Her hair in the fake movie is terrible but she looks great in "real life". 

I missed Valentina Cortese's drunken diva and Alexandra Stewart's pregnant star - they were lots of fun, I felt both need another beat. Jean Pierra Leaud's annoyingness suits his character.

It's fun.

Movie review - "Casino Royale" (1967) **

 It's not fun but it's like a colourful museum and every Bond fan should see it. And because there is so much happening with so many actors I like I got something out of it.

Where to start:

- Woody Allen has genuinely funny gags with the firing squad

- I liked Peter Sellars as a Bond type

- Orson Welles is a terrific Bond villain

- quite a few women have agency: Ursula Andress as Vesper, Barbara Bouchet as Miss Moneypenny, Joanna Pettet is the hero of her own segment

- Terence Cooper gets a big intro then disappears

- Deborah Kerr really really overacts

- I don't think David Niven was anything like Bond, in the books or movies

- Bouchet and Jackie Bisset should have been real Bond girls they are gorgeous

- there is a lot of genuine cleverness

- there is a lot more laziness

- it piles it on but then many 60s comedies did (The Great Race, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World)

- the music score is great - the theme and "The Look of Love"

- there's genuine emotional moments which could have (don't laugh) been more mined: Andress falling for Sellers, Pettet and dad Niven

Movie review - "The Greek Tycoon" (1978) ***

 I was surprised how much I enjoyed this movie. It's got two talented stars perfectly cast, a strong story, decent locations, entertaining "millionaire lifestyle porn" (the Aegean Sea, luxury yachts). It's very empathetic to Jackie and Onassis - it does lean more towards him, but you can see why they got married, their attraction, and why it didn't work. The ending was quite moving with Quinn sending Bisset away so he can be by himself with his fatal illness and dog in a small village.

It's fun spotting people like Churchill, Callas, JFK, RFK. Bisset's hairstyles are a bit mumsy - she can look better than this.

Movie review - "St Ives" (1976) **

The first collaboration between Charles Bronson and J. Lee Thompson. Bronson tries to smooth up his image - he's more cultured, has extra dialogue, uses his wits rather than fists, he has character touches (he's writing a novel, he has a gambling problem). There's Jacqueline Bisset as the female lead and John Houseman.

Bronson is hired by Houseman to find a thing. The handling feels 70s TV with music to match as well as actors like Dana Eclar and Harry Guardino playing cops. Max Schell pops up as a shrink.

Bronson seems to be having a good time - he's not bad. But it's not a very good movie. I was bored. 

 

The best thing about it is Bisset who is everything you want in a caper movie - beautiful, mysterious, seduces Bronson by rocking over to his place and dropping her coat to the floor. She can act too. It was just an uninteresting story. The final shootout/reveals weren't bad.

Movie review - "The Thief Who Came to Dinner" (1973) ** (warning: spoilers)

I get what they were trying to do here - a throwback to those old 1930s movies about gentleman thieves, such as Raffles, the Lone Wolf, the Saint. The casting was ideal in 1973 - Ryan O'Neal as the thief, Jacqueline Bisset as his girl, Warren Oates as the investigator.

There are some good things about it. Bisset is beautiful and stylish, everything you'd want in this sort of movie; O'Neal very pretty too and ideally cast as the 1973 version of Cary Grant; Oates is strong and tenacious; and there's a decent support cast including Jill Clayburgh (lively and disastrously under-used), Ned Beatty and Austin Pendleton (very funny as a chess expert brought in to battle O'Neal's chess moves via the media).

Walter Hill wrote the script and I enjoyed some of what I assume to be his contributions (I could be wrong): the early banter between O'Neal and Bisset; the scene where Bisset and O'Neal are on a date and she challenges him to rob a house; some of the O'Neal-Oates exchanges; some reversals such as O'Neal trying to get away and being run into by a little old lady who apologises and insists on reporting it. This last bit reminded me of the scene in The Getaway where a money exchange is interrupted by a random thief... and now I think of it, the script is reminiscent of The Driver in some ways - the little old lady interruption results in a night time car chase; and the plot has a dogged crook after a super thief, and the super thief seems to know everything the dogged crook is doing.

But I feel the film doesn't work for the following reasons:

* It's not a very attractive film visually. I get why they set it in Houston - all that new oil money, it provides some novelty - but Houston isn't a pretty town, at least not in this film. There's a lot of roads, and car lots and skyscrapers. The clothes aren't that great, the houses not too spectacular. It needed to be shot in say Miami or the south of France or New York. Or at least have better costumes and design.

*O'Neal's character really is a bit of a prick. I don't mind thief heroes who steal off people who deserve to be robbed - evil corporations, banks, Russians, Nazis, mafia, etc. I guess the people he robs in Houston are rich and can afford it - but are they that bad? It couldn't have hurt to show them being fat rich Texans, or greedy thieves themselves. I know that'a s cliche but at least that's more effective emotionally than watching him just steal. This mattered especially towards the end when O'Neal is knocking out/fighting all these security guards - they're just poor blokes on minimum wage trying to do a job, and this spoilt idiot is rendering them unconscious. I felt for Oates, who was honest, worked hard and just wanted to catch the thief.

*The plot involves O'Neal being introduced to Texan high society, but we never see much of that - the "coming to dinner" of the title. Why not have a few scenes and characters that really illustrate it. It's kind of there but it's all a bit half hearted.

*After a strong start the film gets repetitive and monotonous. Bisset has this sexy, glamorous introduction - looking fantastic and bantering with O'Neal. Then after they hook up she just becomes his girlfriend, useful mainly for the purposes of exposition. I kept waiting for her to do something - betray him, be revealed to be a thief, die, get arrested, something. I guess she helps him escape at the end but that's it. Such a waste.

* Also wasted is Jill Clayburgh who plays O'Neal's ex. She turns up, Oates interrogates her, you think "oh she'll complicate things". But no. I think she's just in there to flesh out some background and underline that O'Neal is irresistible (she makes a move on him). Bisset gets a little jealous but that's it. She's not a rival, a threat, someone to drive the action... you could have cut her out of the whole film.

* I was confused by the ending. Oates busts O'Neal picking up a chess set - that should be evidence enough to convict O'Neal. Right? Then Oates lets O'Neal go because...? I wasn't sure.

It's not a very good movie.

Movie review - "The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean" (1972) **

I think John Milius was a hard writer to film - at his best he wrote in such a big flamboyant style, that he needed characters and handing to match. Milius the director was never up to Milius the writer - he never quite conveyed visually the grandiosity of the scripts. Francis Ford Coppola got it right in Apocalypse Now but he's one of the few. (Just like Brian de Palma is one of the few directors to do justice to the operatic nature of David Mamet's writing.)

I can understand why they would have thought John Huston was ideal to direct The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean - like the central character, Huston was a rogue, a womaniser, a teller of tall tales. But the film he turned in is a sober, buttoned down version, with Paul Newman miscast in the lead. Oh he gives a nice enough performance, hitting all his marks, even being quite effective in the quieter moments - but he's still Paul Newman. You never believe he was an outlaw, or would grow a big beard, or be a megalomaniac. Huston himself actually would have been a better choice.

The plot consists of a series of vignettes - Bean's arrival in town, his revenge on the people who try to kill him, hanging murderer Tab Hunter (an effective performance), meeting reverend Anthony Perkins, getting a bear from John Huston, cavorting with said bear and beautiful Victoria Principal while a song plays on the soundtrack in a scene that throws back to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, taking on an albino gunman (Stacy Keach in perhaps the best bit in the film), knocking out Roddy McDowall, trying to visit Lily Langtry, losing Principal. 

The final act, where McDowall becomes an unconvincing villain and Bean/Newman returns to help his daughter, the not terribly American Jacqueline Bisset, feels very tacked on and is likely to try your patience - though I did like the epilogue with Ava Gardner as Langtry.

I get the feeling the filmmakers were torn about how "likeable" to make Bean. He needed to be compelling but he isn't. Victoria Principal is beautiful but it's a terrible role - pretty adoring simpleton who dies, like Debra Paget in Broken Arrow. There doesn't seem to be any real build - it's not about bringing justice is it, since Bean is mostly lining his own pockets.

I should add though, the script was a lot of fun to read, and some people love the movie. I just didn't enjoy much watching it.

Movie review - "Murder on the Orient Express" (1974) *** (warning: spoilers)

The success of this film kicked off a spate of all star Agatha Christie adaptations - with the quality of the stars declining as things went along. This has a couple of genuine big names, albeit ones whose great days were behind (or in front) of them - Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Vanessa Redgrave, Albert Finney, Tony Perkins (who appeared in many all star films around this time), Lauren Bacall, John Gielgud - plus well known types such as Wendy Hiller, Rachel Roberts, Michael York, Richard Widmark, Martin Balsam, and a couple of not really well known people, like Dennis Quilley and Colin Blakeney.

This is one of the most famous Christie works, for two reasons - the title (and thus setting) and the twist, in that all of them dunnit. A lot of the stars are extremely good value - especially Connery, Bisset, Redgrave, Bacall, Perkins and Gielgud. Ingrid Bergman's performance got on my nerves, indicating all over the place. But the biggest flaw for me was Albert Finney - I thought he was terrible, all tics and hammy mannerisms. Not a patch on Peter Ustinov in later movies in the series.

I'm not a big fan of that soft focus period photography used in the movie (or maybe I saw a crappy print). But some of the cameos are effective and there's genuinely spooky moments such as the opening montage of the kidnapping, and the final recreation of the crime - not enough Christie adaptations made you chill but this one, in these sequences at least, do.

Movie review - "The Deep" (1977) **

This was one of the first movies I ever saw at the drive in, and I have strong memories of visual images from it: scuba divers lurking around underwater wrecks, moray eels chomping on people black men scaring white people, people getting air in air pockets.

Looking at it over 30 years later and that's pretty much all the movie is. Jacqueline Bisset and Nick Nolte are the tourists who stumble upon and old wreck that contains morphine and treasure.

Bisset looks splendid in those opening sequences where she scuba dives without a bra - a poster of this helped the movie make a fortune. But while at first she's part of the action, doing the diving, once Robert Shaw becomes involved it's more of a boys own adventure with Nolte and Shaw going underwater and Bissett being tormented on dry land. She does get to spear one guy and discover a key clue by identifying an old parchment as a female's shopping list.

I think Nolte and Bisset's relationship is meant to be more interesting than it comes across - there's all this allusion to their backstory. But really they just look like two good looking people with money. Robert Shaw adds some crusty gravitas (he was in an awful lot of 70s action films, wasn't he?), and Lou Gossett Jnr has charisma as the baddy and a good death scene... even if it is a bit yuck that all the goodies are white and the baddies black.

Stunning locations, the novelty of a cricket game, a decent amount of adventure.

Script review – “The Thief Who Came to Dinner” by Walter Hill (1972)

An early work from Hill – it’s very professional, moves along smoothly, and the dialogue snaps and crackles (he’s good on romantic banter, something he didn’t do that often in his films). 

 

But it’s a lame story. 

 

That’s not Hill’s fault, it was based on a novel: the hero is Webster, a computer programmer who quits his job and becomes a jewel thief out of boredom. But not just any jewel thief – he’s “the chess burglar”, at which point you’d be forgiven for asking, “didn’t David Niven make this film in 1939?” Even then it was old – incredibly smart, handsome jewel thieves who only steal from rich people, and who have aliases, and win chess games… And there’s a dogged insurance agent who’s after him and the two men come to respect each other… Yawn, snore. The thief has an ex-wife who you think is going to be this important character when she appears in the third act but they don’t do anything with her. Also the love interest character of Laura needed to do something more – betray him, or turn into a proper thief herself, or do a scam.

Movie review – “Bullitt” (1968) ***1/2

I'm surprised I'd never seen this film until now. It's very cool and groovy, very late 60s Steve McQueen, who is in excellent form in the title role. The plot is a bit familiar now we've had all these cop shows, but McQueen and Peter Yates' flashy direction remain enjoyable. The famous car chase also impresses, mostly because it's done in a different style to those done today, i.e. it takes its time, uses long takes and doesn't go overboard with the stunts. Jacqueline Bisset is very pretty and sexy in a thankless part. You'll recognise the support cast from heaps of TV but good luck trying to recall their names, except for Bisset and Robert Vaughan. The climax at the airport surely influenced Michael Mann's Heat.

Movie review - Ladd #36 - "Boy on a Dolphin" (1957) **

Twenty years before Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep, 20th Century Fox had Sophia Loren emerge from the water in a wet shirt and seemingly no bra... and in CinemaScope. It's the highlight of a by-the-numbers treasure hunting scenery piece. For all Loren's beauty and voluptuous figure, her performance is irriating - a lot of hyperactive yelling (in Hollywood of the 1950s most Continental leading ladies had to yell a lot) - though to be fair it was her first Hollywood movie.

According to Alan Ladd's biographer, Ladd was annoyed at the attention paid by the director to Loren, giving her close ups, etc - but honestly Ladd is not in good form here, with energy in some scenes but lethargy in others. He does provide some fun when you watch scenes between Ladd and Loren and you know he's on a box or she's in a ditch. 

Clifton Webb can always be relied on to be a smooth villain and there are some pleasing location footage of Greece (once Daryl F Zanuck left Fox, studio president Spyros Skouras indulged in this liking for Greek material more eg this, The 300 Spartans, It Happened In Athens, the hiring of Peter Levathes). Apart from that, the film lacks excitement, which wouldn't have been too hard to fix - just get someone trying to kill Ladd or have accidents with his equipment and stuff.

Movie review - "Airport" (1970) ***

There is a special place in Heaven for extras in airplane disaster movies - sitting in their chairs, acting feverishgly, being "ordinary", trying to be realistic, then acting scared when the disaster strikes. The extras are in fine form in this film, in their crappy way - but then so is everyone else, from Dean Martin as a quizzical pilot to Jacqueline Bisset as the stewardess, to Barry Nelson as a co-pilot (when I saw Barry Nelson in this, it was like "everyone is in this movie"). Maureen Stapleton has a breakdown, Helen Hayes does cutsie stuff with cutsie music, Van Heflin has nervous ticks, everyone is having an affair, there's not one but two cuckolded housewives in mink coats (Dana Wynter and Barbara Hale). George Kennedy smokes his cigar and attacks his role with the aplomb of someone who knows that no one could be better in that role (the perfect D plot actor was Kennedy). Someone should do a study one day on the portrayl of stewardesses in films - they all come across as hookers/waitresses. The design usually consists of horrible garish yellows and panelling - the 60s morphing into the 70s before your eyes. The handling seems to be crappy flat television style in that Universal studios specialised in. Great story though.