I’m not going to say much about this film as it really needs to be seen to be believed – even then you probably won’t.
It’s co-written by Minder creator Leon Griffiths and co-stars Last of the Summer Wine’s Bill Owen and, as the burb puts it, features a deposed aristocrat, Satanists and Peter Cushing.
It’s tempting to think that the topics on this blog are getting samey, what with the title of my last post shouting about yet another ex-Bond who’s going to be appearing in public and who I have tickets for. This time it’s Mr Sean Connery.
Sean will be at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse on Sunday 24 August to present a screening of Sydney Lumet’s fantastic 1965 film, The Hill. I wrote about The Hill in February 2007 on this very blog (head over to have a look if you have a spare few minutes) and I’m delighted the Filmhouse have managed to secure the presence of Big Tam himself.
I hear he’ll be doing a 15 – 20 minute interview before the screening and I doubt there’ll be questions from the audience, but I’ll try and have one handy anyway. Visit the Filmhouse website to see if there are tickets left…
So with Sean in August and Roger in October, I wonder if George, Tim or Pierce can be persuaded to do any appearances in September, November or December, to round the year off in style?
Photo pinched from the Filmhouse website…
A simple post title there for a simple enough post – Sir Roger Moore will be live at the National Theatre on October 16 2008 and I’m going to be in the audience!
Out and about to promote his new book, My Word is My Bond, Roger will be interviewed on stage before signing copies for the masses. I can’t wait.
Although Roger isn’t my favourite Bond, I can appreciate what he did for the film series when he took over from Sir Sean. He was also in one of my favourite series, Maverick, back in the 50s and he’s been in so many great/cheesy TV shows and films that he’s a genuine national treasure.
I read his diaries written on the set of Live and Let Die a few years back and they are superb – if the new book is as funny it’ll be worth the trip alone.
I was also lucky enough to tour the Forbidden City in Beijing in 2001, and decided to use one of those pre-recorded cassette thingies with the voice of a tour guide pointing out areas of interest. I was stunned to discover that the English language version was by none other than Roger himself! I had the joy of a 2 hour visit to the Forbidden City with James Bond!
I’ll tell him that fascinating fact on the day. Maybe.
If you’re going, drop me a line and I’ll see you at the bar for a swift Dry Martini before the show…for Queen and Country.
A post on the Guardian Film blog on Friday, itself linking off to another site that looks at 8 Aesthetically Awesome Abandoned Movie Theatres in America, reminded me of a website I stumbled across a year or two back that did something similar for Scotland’s cinemas of yesteryear.
The Scottish Cinemas and Theatres Project is ”dedicated to recording and archiving our historic cinema architectural heritage, and to act as a information resource for people interested in that often overlooked part of our social history.”, and it does it in fine style.
My first visit led to me spending an hour or more sifting through the photos of long gone cinemas, some of which are today pubs, theatres or simply gone, to be replaced by new houses or shops. There’s something quite sad about the fact that these places, the centrepoint of so many nights out and long awaited weekend trips to the pictures to see the latest movie from the Hollywood dream factory, are now just another part of history.
If you have a few minutes spare, please take a trip over to the site to see if there’s anywhere you remember visiting. Personally I remember well the ABC (at one time the 123) on Lothian Road, now the rather soulless Odeon, and the old Odeon on South Clerk Street.
I particularly remember going to the old Odeon on the evening of the premiere of the Sean Connery thriller, Entrapment. The street was cordoned off outside to allow the crowds to gather, and as each limo pulled up with celebrities for the red carpet, the students living in the flat next door to the cinema kept playing the James Bond theme on their hi-fi, waiting for Connery to arrive.
Catherine Zeta-Jones and husband Michael Douglas pulled up, waved at the audience and promptly vanished inside the cinema. A few moments later Connery arrived – to the strains of the Bond theme from those neighbours – and took a few minutes to greet the crowds. He then went inside the Odeon, grabbed Zeta-Jones and took her back outside for more photos. Good lad.
If anyone has any other memories, please leave them in the comments section below, otherwise head over to the Cinemas and Theatre Project site for a look-see.
Partly due to the tragic death recently of one of Hollywood’s old guard, Mr Sydney Pollack, and partly because it happened to be on Film Four the other night, I’ve recently finished watching the Pollack directed Three Days of the Condor (1976) starring Robert Redford.
Redford stars as bookish (well about as bookish as Robert Redford can get – we see him hold a book, but this is Robert Redford!) Joseph Turner, a.k.a. The Condor, a CIA operative working out of a nondescript apartment block in New York.
Turner’s section of the CIA are devoted to reading books, magazines and reports that are published around the globe, analysing them for anything that might pose a security threat to the USA.
Popping out of the office for lunch one afternoon, Turner returns to find his friends and colleagues all dead, murdered by Max von Sydow and his cronies. From here Turner goes on the run, at first trusting his bosses after phoning them for help, but soon realising that he’s now the prime suspect in the murder and he’s got nowhere to hide.
From the off this is a cracking thriller, New York looking as imposing and unfriendly to Turner as his own company turns out to be. Shots of the Twin Towers loom, eerily foreshadowing in the mind of any present day viewer the legacy that real-world US policy, touched upon here, would have.
Redford is a fine lead, effortlessly showing the confusion and mistrust of a man on the run. Faye Dunaway is also on great form as her character is drawn into the murky world of US intelligence.
Pollack’s direction is always alert for the interesting camera angle, his lens casting an eager eye over each new location. In fact a quick check of IMDB tells me that excluding the action during the opening credits, this film has approximately 1172 shots in 1 hour 53 minutes and 8 seconds, or an average shot duration of about 5.8 seconds – today Pollack might have used CCTV cameras to get the same effect.
I’ve been thinking about Condor for a few days now, it’s no-nonsense style and fast pace really having made an impression. I’m going to try and track down some more Pollack films over the next few months and see what else I’ve been missing.
James Garner. That’s the answer I always give when asked who my favourite actor is. Recently I had to try and justify this to someone who seemed to have some pretty major Garner prejudice.
Although I like my films and telly, I do try to steer discussion onto other topics when meeting new people, at least for a while. On this occasion I mentioned James Garner, only to be told I was wrong.
While trying not to appear too bothered with this slur, I felt I had to defend his honour in his absence. I like to think I did alright, even after a few Jack Daniels and cokes, but it left me thinking more needs to be done to raise the profile of America’s finest.
So I’ve dug out an article I put together last year for a film course I took (written just after watching The Americanization of Emily) and, before that, here’s what I said about Jimbo back in this blog’s first post:
The blog is dedicated to Mr James Garner, Legend of the West Bret Maverick in Maverick, The Scrounger in The Great Escape and LAs finest, Jim Rockford PI in The Rockford Files.
His work and style epitomise everything I like in my entertainment. Heroes that aren’t black or white, but black and grey. Characters that would rather talk their way out of a situation than fight (who would have the guts to fight someone with a gun in real life? A Garner character would rather leg it). Humour that is understated rather than puerile or OTT. And a bit of realism in amongst the nonsense makes for good entertainment.
And now the article…
James Garner: Legend of the West
For the lowly television actor, the road to movie stardom is one littered with casualties. For every Bruce Willis there’s a David Caruso, for every George Clooney a Matt Le Blanc.
TV audiences will happily sit down each week to watch their favourite show/actor/actress, so why should they pay money to go to the cinema to see them in their latest artistic endeavour? For James Garner, the road has been something of a hazardous one.
In 1956 writer Hollywood screenwriter Roy Huggins was working on an episode of anthology series Conflict. Huggins was in the stages of planning a new TV series, a Western different to the then-current glut of cowboy series. But he lacked a leading man.
While casting for Conflict, Huggins saw a new young actor in action, one James Scott Baumgarner. As Huggins remembers, “I really had stumbled on something wonderful, the rarest thing there is in Hollywood: an actor with an unerring instinct for a funny line.” That actor would soon change his name to James Garner.
Birth of a Maverick
Born in Norman, Oklahoma on 7 April, 1928, Baumgarner had served in the Army in the Korean War. Injured and awarded the Purple Heart, Baumgarner ended up in Los Angeles, taking supporting roles in a host of TV shows and commercials. At 6’1”, dark haired and with a knowing glint in his eye, he was prime leading-man material.
Collaboration between Huggins and Garner led to the creation of the both the role and the character type that would define the actor’s career: Bret Maverick, reluctant hero and gentle grafter.
Maverick brought something new to the Western genre: humour. The series divided its episodes between Garner’s character and his brother Bart, played by Jack Kelly. It soon became clear that Garner’s episodes were the more popular with audiences, his easy-going charm and laconic delivery of lines making him a primetime star. Then the movie people came calling.
During summer filming breaks, Garner started to make his mark as a leading man. Roles in Up Periscope (1959) and Cash McCall (1960) were diverse enough to show Garner’s action-hero and romantic lead credentials, while the 1960s saw Garner’s film career take off.
He was soon being offered scripts for a series of high profile pictures, including The Children’s Hour (1961), a complete tonal shift from most of his other work, The Thrill of it All (1963), second-billing to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (1963), The Americanization of Emily (1964) and Support your Local Sheriff (1969).
At home on the Range
Most of these films allowed Garner to hone the characterisation of the relaxed, combat-shy Everyman, who’s idea of living an easy life is interrupted by events around him. While Robert De Niro may eschew the virtues of method acting, the ability to sustain a note perfect, reliable and audience-friendly character through each of his movies meant that Garner was seen as a safe pair of hands.
If the 1960s were a golden period in Garner’s film career, the 1970s brought new demands. Ironically, it was one of Garner’s friends and TV contemporaries, Clint Eastwood, who would help define the era in such films as A Fistful of Dollars (1954) and Dirty Harry (1971). Garner tried gamely to respond to this with A Man Called Sledge in 1970, a spaghetti western in which he played against type.
His own production company helped him develop more personal films, such as Skin Game (1971). It was as a cowboy that Garner had made his mark, and a cowboy it seemed he would remain. He returned to TV briefly in semi-western Nicholls (1971-1972), which bombed with viewers and critics, before making some little-remembered movies that didn’t appear to tax him.
Saviour came in 1974 from an old collaborator, in the shape of Maverick’s Roy Huggins who, had decided to do for the detective series what Maverick had done for Westerns. The Rockford Files brought something new to the genre of private eyes, and was to all intents an updating of Garner’s previous persona for a new generation. This return to the small screen would revive his career once again.
Moving on
Garner was once quoted as saying, “When I left Rockford in 1980 I decided I want to do films that have interesting characters, people with human emotions and feelings and I’ve been very fortunate to do that.” This seems to sum up much of his film career post-Rockford.
Cinema beckoned again with films such as Victor Victoria (1982) and Murphy’s Romance (1985), for which he was Oscar-nominated. He would go on to produce some of his most interesting performances in a number of acclaimed TV movies for which he was Emmy nominated, such as My Name is Bill W (1989) and Barbarians at the Gate (1993).
An appearance in the movie version of Maverick (1993) could be seen as something of a closure for the Maverick character, a dovetailing of his TV and film careers.
While it’s fair to say that Garner never had the cinematic draw of Clint Eastwood, his failure to break into the Hollywood A-list often attributed to his ‘safe’ persona that lacked the edge offered by contemporaries such as Steve McQueen, his presence has always been a sign of quality.
More recent appearances in films such as Space Cowboys (2001), Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002) and The Notebook (2004) have cemented his position as a respectable, dependable actor from old-Hollywood. His return to primetime television in family comedy Eight Simple Rules in 2004 showed that the small screen wouldn’t let him go and that perhaps that’s just the way he likes it.
To finish off, here’s a decent little interview with Jim on the Charlie Rose show from 2002:
I came to a conclusion this weekend: Richard Attenborough is one of my favourite actors.
Nothing earth shattering there, I’ll admit, but I thought I’d mention it as this only dawned on me while watching 1964’s Seance on a Wet Afternoon last night.
Previously, the only reference I’d heard to the film was in the title of a 1973 episode of Steptoe and Son, Seance in a Wet Rag and Bone Yard.
Like most Steptoes it was, of course, brilliant: Harold still trapped by his old dad in that junk yard while the world carries on outside the gates, oblivious to the tragedy taking place every week…
But I digress.
Seance…stars Richard Attenborough as Bill Savage, husband to Myra Savage (Kim Stanley). We join the film partway into the hatching of their plot to kidnap the daughter of a local businessman, Mr Clayton (Mark Eden, fresh from playing Marco Polo the Doctor Who and years away from portraying tram-troubling Alan Bradley in Coronation Street) and his wife, Mrs Clayton (Nanette Newman).
Their plot – to kidnap the girl and then prove Myra’s clairvoyant abilities by having her carry out a seance where she can then ‘psychically’ reveal the victim’s whereabouts – is technically only Myra’s plot.
Myra’s influence over her husband is seemingly unbreakable, leading to the sort of ‘troubled’ acting that Attenborough does so well (see 10 Rillington Place (1971) for another example). He’s never at ease here, and neither is the viewer.
Director Bryan Forbes (whose translation of the James Clavell novel King Rat (1965) to the big screen I devoured one afternoon recently) had an eye for the mundane amongst the madness, realising that it’s in the detail – such as the spelling mistakes in the ransom note – that the viewer can identify with characters, while the bigger story develops around them.
It’s a superb film, with a haunting performance from Kim Stanley, for which she was Oscar nominated that year (she lost out to Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins), and boasting a fine John Barry score.
As I mentioned above, Dickie Attenborough cements himself in my mind as one of our finest screen actors, while his partnership with Forbes produced some memorable pictures: The Angry Silence (1960), The League of Gentlemen (1960) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961) to name but three.
And I still love The Great Escape every Christmas, even if it is just on DVD.
I finally managed to see Kitano ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s masterpiece, Zatoichi, tonight. After missing it at the cinema, nearly buying the DVD a while back and forgetting to tape it off the TV a few times, I managed to record it the other night off Channel Four.
Well worth the wait.
Zatoichi (Takeshi) is a blind swordsman and masseur, who roams feudal Japan helping the helpless. It’s a violent, witty and tragic tale of revenge, directed beautifully by its star.
The music is noticeable but not intrusive, adding to the tension of scenes rather than guiding them or demanding emotion. I don’t claim to be an expert on Japanese martial arts films but this surely ranks as one of the better ones.
The last time I watched anything similar was a few years ago at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh, when they held an Akira Kurosawa season. I’d read that 1958’s Hidden Fortress was a heavy influence on 1977’s Star Wars and had to see it for myself.
One last thought on martial arts films and TV… I don’t know what it’s like for anyone else in their 30s brought up on the weekly adventures of Monkey back in the early 80s, but I still hold that up as something of a benchmark for these sort of things.
Monkey had some superb scripts that had both comedy and a touch of (occasionally heavy-handed) morality. Granted, UK audiences only got a roughly translated version, but even these managed to tug at the heartstrings once in a while, usually just after Monkey, Pigsy, Sandy and Tripitaka had liberated another village from demons during a bonkers, high-octane, dodgy effects-laden fight scene.
The fact that it’s stuck in my memory for 25 years suggests it must have done something right.
Anyone for ‘Zatoichi meets Monkey’?
And here’s the fantastic end title music…
Good old BBC2. Just when Summer telly is looking dire, with endless episodes of B*g B*****r (I can’t bear to say, let alone write about a certain ‘reality’ TV show), along comes The Summer of British Film to restore the faith.
Following an interview with BBC2 Controller Roly Keating on the latest Observer Film Weekly podcast, where he was very enthusiastic about the season, I’m really looking forward to this.
Every week, starting on Saturday 28 July, there’ll be a new documentary in the British Film Forever series covering 100 years of British film. Episodes are split into genres:
Best of all, to accompany the documentaries, BBC2 will also be screening around 60 films from the last 100 years.
I’m now off to finally invest in a DVD Recorder to make the most out the season.
un·der·dog
1. One that is expected to lose a contest or struggle, as in sports or politics
2. One that is at a disadvantage
You’ve gotta love the underdog. David or Goliath? Smiths Salt-n-Shake or Kettle Chips? Corner shop or multinational conglomerate? Muppet Treasure Island or Pirates of the Caribbean? Give me the little guy fighting for his right to party anytime.
The story of the good ship Serenity is one that starts way back in 2002, when the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon, created a new series outside the Buffyverse called Firefly. No teen angst or vampires here, just a rag-tag group of renegades slooping round the universe trying to make a dishonest living.
This had hit written all over it. Then it got cancelled after 11 episodes and the dream was over. RIP Firefly, we hardly knew ya.
Then, in 2005, Whedon managed to get a deal together to produce a movie version of the series – Serenity – with the original cast. The underdog lived to fight another day, David to the TV execs Goliath. Or something.
Fast forward to 23 June 2007 in the Filmhouse in Edinburgh and I’m watching the charity screening of the film at Can’t Stop the Serenity with an audience of Browncoats (the name given to the fans by the fans). It’s Joss Whedon’s birthday and the aim is to screen the film in around 47 countries around the globe to raise money for Equality Now.
I own the DVD but never got around to watching it, so this was a great chance to see it on the big screen. The audience were excited, the organisers, all fans, really enthusiastic.
I’m glad I went along, mainly because I got to see the film the way it was meant to be seen, but also to get a glimpse into a fandom that loves their wee show to death. I’m not sure what it’s like on a larger scale (I’m sure there are pockets of nastiness somewhere on the web if you look hard enough) but this was a good place to hang out on a wet Sunday in Scotland.
Shiny.
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