Patton (1970)
DIRECTOR: Franklin J. Schaffner
CAST:
George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Ed Binns, Michael Bates, Karl Michael Vogler, Siegfried Rauch, Richard Münch, Paul Stevens, Tim Considine, Clint Ritchie
REVIEW:
Equally effective as a war film or a character study, Patton still holds up today chiefly due to the towering lead performance by George C. Scott. Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster were all offered the title role, but after watching the film it is impossible to imagine anyone else but Scott. Patton can be enjoyed simply as one of the great film performances of all time. Scott does not simply play Patton; he has become so synonymous with the character that the real George Patton of WWII archive footage seems like an imposter. Credit is also due the capable direction by Franklin J. Schaffner, producer Frank McCarthy (a retired brigadier general who had worked for twenty years to make a movie about Patton), the intelligent, even-handed screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, and the cinematography by Fred Kroenkamp, who enhances the film with his sweeping shots of Tunisia, France, and Germany. John Huston, Henry Hathaway, and Fred Zinnemann had declined to direct. William Wyler agreed but later left over script disagreements with Scott. Whatever difficulties they may have had during filming, the efforts of the cast and crew paid off, as Patton went on to win eight Oscars, including Best Actor for Scott (which he famously refused, calling the Oscars a ‘self-serving meat parade’), Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best Production Design.
The Battle of Britain (1969)
DIRECTOR: Guy Hamilton
CAST:
Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Robert Shaw, Michael Caine, Ian McShane, Trevor Howard, Michael Redgrave, Sir Laurence Olivier, Kenneth More, Ralph Richardson, Patrick Wymark, Edward Fox, Curt Jürgens, Karl-Otto Alberty, Manfred Reddemann, Alexander Allerson, Harry Andrews, Michael Bates, Hein Reiss, Rolf Stiefel
REVIEW:
This British-German co-production from director Guy Hamilton was intended as an epic war classic paying tribute to the courageous pilots of the Battle of Britain, but is unfortunately a largely muddled production boasting the usual large all-star cast and some excellently choreographed air battle sequences but lacking much in the way of focus, clarity, storyline, or human interest. Continue reading
The Bridge at Remagen (1969)
DIRECTOR: John Guillermin
CAST:
George Segal, Ben Gazzarra, Robert Vaughn, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Hans Christian Blech, Joachim Hansen, Peter Van Eyck, Heinz Reincke, Richard Münch, Günter Meisner.
REVIEW:
Director John Guillermin and an American and German cast brings us this exciting, fast-paced, and remarkably even-handed account of the desperate struggle of two small groups of men, the Americans to capture a bridge leading into Germany, and the Germans to destroy it, in the final months of WWII in Europe. Continue reading
La Battaglia di El Alamein/The Battle of El Alamein (1969)
DIRECTOR: Giorgio Ferroni
CAST:
Frederick Stafford, Enrico Maria Salerno, Robert Hossein, Michael Rennie, George Hilton, Gerard Herter, Marco Guglielmi
REVIEW:
We don’t usually hear much about the Italians in WWII; the Germans and Japanese were considered the big guns on the Axis side, with the Italians kind of tagging along. The main reason for this is that there simply isn’t much to say.
Continue readingWait Until Dark (1967)
DIRECTOR: Terence Young
CAST: Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Jack Weston, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Julie Herrod
REVIEW:
An adaptation of the 1966 play of the same name by Frederick Knott, written for the screen by Robert Carrington and Jane Howard Carrington, Terence Young’s suspense crime caper Wait Until Dark almost succeeds in spite of itself; the plot has more holes than Swiss Cheese, but a slick twisty-turny—-if far from airtight—-script keeps things moving along and reels the viewer in in spite of themselves, assuming they have a decent margin for suspension of disbelief.
Continue readingIs Paris Burning? (1966)
DIRECTOR: Rene Clement
CAST: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Jean-Pierre Cassel, George Chakiris, Bruno Cremer, Alain Delon, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Gert Frobe, Yves Montand, Anthony Perkins, Simone Signoret, Robert Stack, Pierre Vaneck, Marie Versini, Skip Ward, Orson Welles, Claude Rich, Gunter Meisner, Joachim Hansen, Wolfgang Preiss, Karl-Otto Alberty, Hannes Messemer, Billy Frick
REVIEW:
From French director Rene Clement and a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal comes this large-scale but rather muddled and ponderous French war film that tries to be a classic WWII epic like The Longest Day or A Bridge Too Far but doesn’t achieve their status. Continue reading
The Longest Day (1962)
DIRECTOR:
American scenes: Andrew Marton
British scenes: Ken Annakin
German scenes: Bernhard Wicki
CAST:
Americans: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Beymer, Rod Steiger, Sal Mineo, Roddy McDowall, Eddie Albert, George Segal, Paul Anka, Red Buttons, Fabian, Mel Ferrer, Steve Forrest, Robert Ryan, Robert Wagner, Stuart Whitman
British: Richard Burton, Peter Lawford, Kenneth More, Sean Connery
Germans: Curt Jürgens, Hans Christian Blech, Heinz Reincke, Paul Hartmann, Richard Münch, Wolfgang Preiss, Peter Van Eyck, Werner Hinz, Gert Fröbe
French: Irina Demick, Christian Marquand, Georges Wilson
REVIEW:
The king of the ’60s and ’70s epic WWII films. One of the most colossal productions ever mounted, and a pet project of high-rolling Hollywood mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, The Longest Day was an adaptation of journalist and author Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name, a 180 degrees chronicle of D-Day from compiled interviews from both Allied and German participants, as well as French Resistance agents and civilians. Like Ryan’s book, the movie tells the story of the pivotal Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France in June 1944 from every conceivable angle, from the Allied commanders risking it all on a nail-biting roll of the dice, to their harried German counterparts across the English Channel struggling to organize an effective counterattack amid hopeless confusion, to the common soldiers fighting it out on the beaches and in the hedgerows, to the French Resistance fighters doing their part to aid the liberation of their country, to the French civilians, overjoyed even as they are plunged into the middle of one of the most famous battles in history. This is a boon to history buffs with a strong interest in the subject matter, while those less enthralled might uncharitably refer to The Longest Day as “the longest movie” (it runs a formidable three hours). It’s not for everyone, and it lacks the intensity and immediacy of smaller-scale, more character-driven onscreen depictions of the D-Day invasion from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, but for history buffs seeking a comprehensive overview of D-Day, or fans of classic ’60s and ’70s war films, this is an epic “classic” the way they don’t make them anymore. Continue reading
Spartacus (1960)
DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick
CAST: Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Tony Curtis, Peter Ustinov, Charles Laughton, John Gavin
REVIEW:
Rightfully regarded as one of the best of the old sword and sandals Roman and/or Biblical epics that were in vogue in Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s (see also the likes of The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, etc), Spartacus exists in the same vein as the likes of Braveheart or Gladiator, blending epic spectacle on the kind of lavish grandiose scale seldom mounted, and a surprising amount of intellectual weight. Some elements are dated, but the core aspects retain their strength.
Continue readingPeeping Tom (1960)
DIRECTOR: Michael Powell
CAST: Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Maxine Audley, Moira Shearer
REVIEW:
Coming out only months before Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom narrowly beat it out for staking a claim to fame as the original founder of the slasher movie genre (although by modern standards, or even the standards of the likes of Halloween or Friday the 13th in the next decade, there’s precious little “slashing”). One has to remember the year of its release; for a movie that feels exceedingly tame in its usually implied violence today, it was shocking and controversial at the time. It’s also strange to consider that Psycho, which premiered only months later and had even more depraved subject matter, was a huge hit and acclaimed, while Peeping Tom was a notorious flop that was pulled from theaters, virtually ended its director’s career, and was savaged by the British press. Critics seemed to be in a competition for the most hyperbolic and pearl-clutching condemnations. Derek Hill, reviewer of Tribune magazine, stated colorfully that “the only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer. Len Mosley, writing for the Daily Express, stated even more hyperbolically that the film was “more nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, and the gutters of Calcutta”. Such was the scorn leveled at the film that star Carl Boehm later recalled that no one at the premiere wanted to shake his or his director Powell’s hand. However, in following decades the film eventually earned a more favorable critical reappraisal as an ahead-of-its-time psychological horror thriller and gained prominent admirers like Martin Scorsese, who praised the film in writings and even chipped in $5,000 to help the relatively obscure and forgotten film find a wider audience with a 1978 re-release.
Continue readingThe Enemy Below (1957)
DIRECTOR: Dick Powell
CAST: Robert Mitchum, Curt Jurgens, Theodore Bikel, David Hedison, Frank Albertson, Russell Collins, Kurt Kreuger
REVIEW:
From actor-turned-director Dick Powell, adapted by Wendell Mayes from the 1956 novel of the same name by Denys Rayner, comes this fairly small-scale but entertaining cat-and-mouse game between two men—-the captain of an American destroyer, and the captain of a German U-Boat—-in the South Atlantic during WWII.
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