Change Your Image
subadc
Reviews
Bitter Harvest (1963)
Shown on British TV in April 2017
This review does contains spoilers about the end of the movie so don't read if you don't want to know the ending.
This film was shown on British TV in April 2017 on a channel called Talking Pictures (available on Sky as well as other TV platforms). Talking Pictures shows many old movies and is worth hunting out for fans of long lost or hard to find movies.
I wont cover the story of the movie as it has been covered by other reviewers, so my main comments are about the seemingly "lost" 20 or 30 minutes or so at the end.
SPOILER. The bulk of the film is about the girl leaving Wales, coming to London, being "used" by a couple of men, then living for a while with a fine young man who works in a local pub. This takes up about 85% or 90% of the film
But then she begins to go down the path of becoming a prostitute / call girl and then the film suddenly ends. We have no real evidence for her strange behaviour at the end. It is almost as though there is a "lost"20 or 30 minutes or so showing her descent into this sordid world.
This film was made in 1963 so maybe the "lost" 20 or 30 minutes was too graphic or sexual to be included in the film so it was totally removed.
Other reviewers above have also commented about the sudden ending so it seems to be a common view.
I assume this 20 / 30 minutes WAS filmed (but have no evidence of it) but I have to say it is one of the worst examples of poor editing I have ever seen in any film.
Overall though a reasonable film (though a little predictable) and similar to other "gritty" films made in the early 1960s. Contains a number of well known British actors who will be familiar to anyone living in the UK who has watched many British films and TV programs.
Gonks Go Beat (1964)
Very strange film (and very bad)
I watched this film in February 2017 on British TV (for details see below for others who may wish to watch it).
I have to say it is pretty awful. A sci-fi movie giving a retelling of the Romeo and Juliet story. Strange eh !
For people who "grew up" in the 1960s (like me) it is hard for people today to realize that watching pop groups at the time was difficult (we did not have 30 music channels on Sky as we have today for example).
So a number of films were made trying to cram as many pop groups in as they could. However most of the singers / bands / songs in this film are forgettable (yet another bland pop song rhyming "walk" with "talk", probably the most obvious rhyme you can come up with).
I am a fan of "bad" movies and I have to say this is right up there with the best / worst (alongside Dean Martin in his Matt Helm movies). If you are a fan of bad movies do try to catch it.
This film was shown on British TV in February 2017. It is on the TV channel "Talking Pictures" which is available on most platforms in the UK (Freeview, Sky, Virgin). The channel shows mostly lost or historical films and is a great place to watch films that may never have been shown on TV before (from all eras - 1930s up to 1990s).
Enola Gay: The Men, the Mission, the Atomic Bomb (1980)
Has not aged well
I watched this on UK TV in July 2011 in two parts on the "True Movie" channel.
I have always been interested in the second world war (all aspects) so thought this film may give some interesting background to the people involved in dropping the first Atomic bomb (mainly the crew of the planes but also the top brass like Generals and politicians who had to make the decision of whether to drop the bomb or not).
However while this COULD have been an interesting and well made film, I am afraid it wasn't.
It tried to be a "human interest" story, showing the effect the training had on the families and girlfriends of the soldiers, and of some of the people living in Hiroshima, but these section were not well made and you did not really care very much about their private lives.
The film had aged very badly (it was from 1980), was rather disjointed (though it may have been badly edited for TV), and at times was unintentionally laughable.
The film did not flow well at all, and some scenes were shown in almost total isolation with no reference made to WHY they had been included.
One example was where Billy Crystal went walking round the island with an army friend. They came across a Japanese soldier hiding in a cave who shot the friend, then Billy Crystal shot the Japanese soldier. Thats how the scene ended (in the cave) and no reference was made to this scene again.
While there were scenes where you KNEW you were watching historic film (like when they showed newsreels from the war) there were other times where they put in historical sections of film, pretending it was modern film.
For example they obviously had access to one or two real B52s, so could show them flying over with the actors standing on the ground watching, but when they wanted to show lots of B52s in the air they showed old war film (possibly colorized), but it stood out a mile when they cut back and forth from old film to new film.
The most laughable example of not having access to the real thing was when the Japanese general was talking to a young soldier about how the harbor below used to be full of Japanese battleships, and he did a sweeping movement with his hand.
The camera "cut" to the harbor but it looked like the picture off the front of an old postcard (with badly faded color) and was obviously not a "film" of the real harbor.
I did manage to watch both sections of the film, though found much of it hard going. I did learn a little of what the crew must have gone through in the build up to the dropping of the bomb and the security issues involved.
But overall it was a pretty poor film and I can think of far better ways of spending over 2 hours.