Book review - "Dervish Dust: The Life and Words of James Coburn" by Robyn Coburn (2022)

 Robyn Coburn is an Aussie, married to James Coburn, son of the actor, so this book has an excellent inside track - close to its source but not too close. Certain it''s open about Coburn (I'll use the star's surname more) being a crap father, absent and not interested, and a grumpy old opinionated man. But a fine actor, superb speaking voice, some excellent performances. The book benefits from his letters, thoughts and interviews - as a member of the family the writer has superb access.

Coburn had a fascinating life and career. Tall, deep voiced, silver haired. He got professional work quite quickly. Benefited from being able to study under the GI Bill (he was drafted in the early 1950s but was in Europe not the Korean War). He always seemed to be able to support himself via advertisements - when starting out and later on. When he began getting TV work the jobs came thick and fast - he was ideal as villains in Westerns and played a lot of them. His film career was respectable quickly too - Ride Lonesome then The Magnificent Seven. He had a great run as a second lead. The Flint films turned him into a star but his actual period as a top level name above the star wasn't long. But 1980 there were no more film leading roles, and TV didn't give him that much longer either. But he always had his voice and cameos.

A genuine hippy. Managed to link to popular culture in odd ways - a mate of Bruce Lee's, in the Band on the Run photo, a rejected Cosmo nude centerfold (the one before Burt Reynolds), a big car importer, in some films edited badly by Jim Aubrey. 

He had a great 60s and pretty good 70s. Things went south in late 70s and took a while to bounce back. Won an Oscar with Affliction but that didn't so much for his career. Managed to appear in some iconic films though. Made a LOT of flops.

Movie review - "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (2019) ***1/2 (warning: spoilers)

Random thoughts
- Nicholas Hammond of all people knocks it out of the park
- Bruce Dern was fine but that would have been the perfect last role for Burt Reynolds
- like a lot of film buffs I was sitting there going "I love a lot of this but I get the Fabian and Michael Rennie references, I'm weird, what about normal people?"
- the film was about fetishness - movie posters, TV guide, cigarette packets, logos
- the money is well spent - it's a film about movie stars, production design and Tarantino - without those things it would be a hard slog (for some people it will be)
- I get the ending and I liked it
- the final assault ramming head repeatedly thing... that wasn't cool... wasn't cathartic in the way that say killing Nazis in Inglorious Basterds was or slave owners in Django Unchained was or rapist men in Kill Bill was... the women were killers but marginalised members of society... also we just meet them in the film.
- all the acting is excellent
- I wonder if the 8 year old girl on the set of Lancer is some allusion to James Stacy's pedophilia, not accessed in the film
- there is no female role with shade and dimension - Tate dances and is ethereal, the Charlie girls are sex objects/psychos/"other", Ric's Italian wife jabbers and gesticulates even though she takes part in a crucial scene, Brad Pitt's wife is a nagging bitch... in contrast the male roles are given lots of depth... Brad and Leo of course but also Emile Hirsch's pining Jay Sebring, Bruce Dern's George Spahn
- the visit to the Spahn Ranch was v creepy
- Mike Moh is a great Bruce Lee

Movie review - "Game of Death" (1978) **

One of the most bizarre films ever made. When he died, Bruce Lee left behind some fighting footage for a movie he never got to complete (which was to star George Lazenby incidentally). Golden Harvest decided they couldn't let it go to waste, so they brought in Robert Clouse, director of Enter the Dragon, and cobbled together a plot about a Bruce Lee style actor who upsets the mob, who then try to kill him... so he goes into hiding and seeks his revenge via way of various disguises. They added a bunch of Hollywood actors to help make it more appealing for the world market.

Now that's actually a decent idea for a movie - its similar to the premise of Return to Eden, and is based in strong emotion (desire for revenge, watching your partner think you are dead). But the kick off is weak - I didn't buy that they would go to all this trouble to shoot Lee just to prove a point. (I wish they'd had more history with Lee, like was a childhood friend he owed a favour too or something).)

And the doubling of him isn't very effective - Bruce Lee was so distinctive it's really obvious when someone is impersonating him. They try to add extra Bruce by putting in clips from Way of the Dragon and Fists of Fury but that makes things even more distracting.

Because Bruce Lee made so few movies as a star this is still worth seeing. The fight stuff at the end is pretty good, especially the bout he has with Kareem Abdul Jabar. Colleen Camp does the best she can with her role as Lee's girlfriend (a singer who at one point is so deranged with grief she decides to shoot his assassin). Gig Young adds some professional sheen as his journalist friend, Dean Jagger is fine as a mob boss, and Hugh O'Brien good as a baddie... until he has to do kung fu. I really liked this as a kid but it so didn't hold up.

Movie review - "Enter the Dragon" (1973) ***** (warning: spoilers)

Dynamic, exciting, brilliantly successful attempt to present Bruce Lee in a Hollywood movie. It plunders all sorts of inspirations, from James Bond to the house of mirrors finale in Lady from Shanghai, in this perfectly acceptable tale of Lee being asked by a vague intelligence organisation (Mr Braithwaite) to take part in a martial arts competition on an island run by an evil doctor. To add some personal connection it turns out one of the doctor's lackeys was responsible for the death of Lee's sister (in a flashback scene we get to see a girl do some martial arts, very successfully for the most part - there's also a female undercover agent on the island which makes this the Bruce Lee film with the two strongest female roles, ie. they're not just simpering good girls).

Two other men are invited to the island - Jim Kelly, who has one of the best Affros you'll ever see, and a great, wry presence, plus a fun gag where he takes a whole lot of women to bed (hey I said there were some good female parts, not all).... and a quite shocking death. There's also John Saxon, who isn't entirely convincing as a top rank martial artist (he looks too heavy and slow) but he's an excellent actor with perhaps the best character in the film - a dodgy guy who still has his own code of honour, and helps Lee in the end. I really enjoyed the mutual respect that grows between Saxon and Lee (yes I know that's in part because he's my Western surrogate in the movie but it's still true), as exemplified by their nod at the end. I was also a fan of the little subplot between him and the girl on the island who winds up dead.

Some fantastic fight scenes and plenty of them. Again, Lee tackles a really old dude at the end but it feels more equal here because the guy has a claw. All time classic music score and it looks fantastic - the extra money from Warners was well spent.

Movie review - "Way of the Dragon" (1972) *** (warning: spoilers)

Directors of Bruce Lee films who aren't Bruce Lee (eg Robert Clouse, Lo Wei) sometimes get a bad wrap, with critics tending to attribute everything good in the movies to Lee. This was Lee's properly credited directorial debut - but it isn't as good as his first two films with Lo Wei, so Wei obviously bought something to the party.

It's still entertaining, mind, and the fight scenes are excellent - particularly the climactic battle between Lee and Chuck Norris in the Colosseum - but the handling is flabby, the acting campier (check out the black guy among the villains), and there is far too much dopey comedy. (This is all a matter of personal taste of course but Lee wouldn't be the first auteur who went over board on the hyuck factor).

Story wise the movie is weak too - and Lee wrote the script - because the stakes are so small: who cares if the Mob take over Lee's relative's restaurant in Rome? There's not even a good old racial element that could've been used because there are so many Chinese in the mob. (Though I did like the twist that the uncle turns dodgy and kills his own staff with a view to getting all the carnage over and done with.) Still, definitely worth watching.

Movie review - "The Big Boss" (1971) ***

Bruce Lee became a star with this Hong Kong kung fu epic. Like many of them the basic story could have been done as a Western - he's a country hick who moves to Thailand where his family work for an ice factory. It turns out this factory is the front for a drug operation.

Lee doesn't do much in the first bit of this film, being more of a watcher. (The first fight scene he literally just watches as James Tien - who was in Fists of Fury - does the chop socky against the forces of evil.) Story wise he doesn't get roused for a long time - in Fists he was angry from the get go but here he goes through this whole period where he is tempted by the dark side when the boss makes him foreman and plies him with drink and gives him a hooker to sleep with (he has sex with her too; she goes topless which did surprise me for a Bruce Lee movie).

However then his family members start getting knocked off and he fires up and in the second half he really kicks arse and takes part in some top fight scenes (even if the Boss he defeats at the end is kind of whimpy and not worth Lee's skill.)

There's some great music. The scenery isn't that pretty - it doesn't feel much like Thailand. (I'm not sure where it was shot.)

Movie review - "Fists of Fury" (1972) ***1/2*

For my money, this is the Bruce Lee classic - an excellent story, which is simple but has historical basis and lots of emotional power, a strong support cast, superb fight scenes. It's set in early 20th century Shanghai, where the Chinese were second class citizens in their own country - in particularly, according to this movie, they were persecuted by the Japanese.

Bruce Lee is the student of a real life Chinese martial arts guy who genuinely died under mysterious circumstances (we never meet him) who is determined not to take it from the Japanese. There are some very rousing moments like the Japanese (who are pretty much racially vilified in this film) taunting the Chinese, the sign that says "No dogs or Chinese allowed" (with a Sikh guard played by a browned-up Chinese), Lee's spectacular final leap (freeze frame death).

This movie has a great atmosphere of doom and menace - the constant racism of the Japanese, the struggle of the school to survive, Lee taking out the baddies one by one but ultimately being doomed, the massacre of the Chinese school. The love affair subplot is simple stock stuff but provides some necessarily relief.

Of course there are the fight scenes which are incredible - particularly the one where Lee walks alone into the enemy school and takes them apart. All the others are of high quality too. Lee is in stunningly good form - lithe, charismatic, furious, deadly. Fantastic music score.

Book review - "Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God" by Nat Segaloff (2014)

Good to see more and more screenwriters getting biographies and Silliphant deserved one - a big name in TV (he wrote truckloads of Naked City and Route 66 eps) as well as films, where his credits include In the Heat of the Night and lots of 70s disaster films. Segloff interviewed Silliphant for an installment of the excellent Backstory series of books and he's fleshed it out for a full length book.

I enjoyed reading this a lot - Silliphant had a hell of a career, working his way up from publicity flak to top screenwriter in Hollywood, and has a bunch of impressive credits (The Village of the Damned, Charly), as well as standard embarrassments all long term screenwriters enjoy (The Killer Elite, Over the Top). His personal life was full of incident and tragedy - several marriages, a son was murdered - and took many unusual detours - for instance, he was an early champion of Bruce Lee, was genuinely interested in South East Asia and tried to promote the Thai film industry.

There were two main drawbacks to the book for me - one, I would have preferred it had Segaloff analysed Silliphant's writing more. To be fair, he says upfront in the introduction he didn't want to do that, but I think was an opportunity missed - while Silliphant did a lot of hack-for-hire work, he also wrote plenty that went as intended to the screen (especially his early TV work and novels) and I would have liked to here Segaloff's take on his themes and so on. (Some of this is there - I just would have preferred more).

Secondly - and I'm being very blunt here - Silliphant was a bit of a dickhead. It's an extremely sympathetic biography and Silliphant is allowed to speak for himself extensively, but the more I got to know him, the less I liked him. Notwithstanding the tragedy of losing a child it's clear he was a lousy father, particularly to his daughter; he wasn't much as a husband either - he was closer to his last wife, but still ended up separated from her during the last few years of his life, living with mistresses; he idiotically refused cancer treatments which could have saved/prolonged his life because he didn't want to lose his sexual potency; he got hooked on big salaries and blew a lot of it; when he wrote something personal towards the end of his life, he wrote junky adventure novels (I think Silliphant's problem was he'd told all the personal stories he wanted to tell by the 60s after Route 66; then it was about getting hold of the money); he lacked a sense of humour (there are no comedies in the Sillphant canon).

Segaloff extensively quotes his last wife, Tiana, a lot and speaks highly of her, but she doesn't come out of this that great either, constantly whining that she didn't become a movie star.

Still, he was clearly a man of great talent whose achievements are worth recording and celebrating. Segaloff has done that here.

Movie review - "Kentucky Fried Movie" (1977) **1/2

Not as hilarious-seeming as it was when I was ten, but still full of moments of brilliance - particularly ads, like the Hare Krishna's advertising beer, the alternative ways of getting oil, trailers such as Catholic High School Girls in Trouble and Cleopatra Schwartz. Some bits go on too long, like the Enter the Dragon spoof, and others just clunk, and it might have benefited from having some actors re-appear (I think one or two do - but a more regular cast gives a feeling of greater recognition. Surely we could have had more of George Lazenby who's only in one scene). But still very funny.