j.pasteur Reviews

Wildflower (1991 TV Movie)

The Waltons meet Helen Keller ...

[6 May 2003]

Was genuinely moved by the content of this tale of extremes of human nature. The barbarity of keeping a young girl in a shed versus the humanitarian sincerity was handled well by actress-director Diane Keaton. Patricia Arquette in particular must have found it difficult to play her role as the disadvantaged AND hearing-impaired Alice, uttering her lines as a deaf woman... with all the embarrassment that must go with it.

Perhaps I have been alone too long. Or perhaps - over-educated and right after yet another vicious superpower vs. small nation war, with the subsequent revelations of bestial cruelty - I am still surprised by humankind's inhumanity to humankind.

But there are pinpricks of light out there, somewhere. And with that thought, Humankind still has, at the very least, some hope...

North by Northwest (1959)

Classic Hitch.

[16 February 2003]

A classic film of a classic 'Hitchcockian' case of mistaken identity, this is essentially a remake of THE 39 STEPS - but considerably expanded to make use of glorious technicolour and to emphasize the paranoia that can develop from a man feeling pushed to his very limit by events and circumstances maliciously controlled by others. As usual, Hitch has a cameo in his own film: #Man Missing Departing Bus, at the very beginning!

Overgrown mummy's boy but successful advertizing executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for 'George Kaplan,' a CIA-created 'legend' (the intelligence community's jargon for the name and biography invented to hide operatives' real identities) designed to decoy Van Dam (James Mason), agent provocateur of an unspecified foreign power, away from their genuine agent's activities. To prove his innocence, Fairburn must be 'Kaplan' so as to draw Van Dam and his men out and expose them. Nevertheless, 'the memorable scenes' are indeed memorable: the cropduster and the dénoument dangling off Mount Rushmore.

Glamour is provided by the very fine Eve Marie-Saint, who demonstrates that 'they just don't make 'em like they used to' ... women simply do not have that glamorous mystique anymore (nor do cameramen have soft-focus lenses, apparently); nowadays, what you see is what you get: very little subtlety, but a lot of bare flesh and squelchy kissing. Come on, film-makers, do leave us something to the imagination - that's what the nickelodeon chaps made films to be all about, remember!

I first saw this film when I was 13, in a hotel in St. Dogmaels in Wales. A boy & girl combo came into the TV room and the film managed to desist their squelchy kissing. An elderly couple entered during the ad-break and the chap rather pompously asked if we could switch over for The News. The rest of us thereupon trooped down to the cellar-room, where, unheated (this was still Britain in the 1970s), the remainder of the film was viewed and thoroughly enjoyed. In fact, the cold probably added to the film's atmosphere ...

Stalwart and calm Leo G. Carroll, the 'professor,' played this same sort of rôle again the followed decade, as 'General Waverley,' stalwart and calm commander of the United Network for Communications & Law Enforcement - "When one has manners, one need never apologize ..." Quite so!

Pulp (1972)

An unregarded gem.

[10/10 · 13 February 2003]

"Can you walk a little faster?" said the whiting to the snail. "There's a porpoise right behind me, and he's treading on my tail..."

Michael Caine had a pretty good year in 1972. GET CARTER was one of his best-ever films, but he was also nominated, along with Laurence Olivier, for an Academy Award for his rôle in the film adaptation of Anthony Shaffer's stage play SLEUTH (neither of them got it, though - that year it went to Marlon Brando in THE GODFATHER).

More an off-beat comedy than a drama, PULP is a nice little blend of Alfie and Harry Palmer, and is a sadly unregarded gem that has nevertheless become a bit of a cult film loaded with many inside jokes. The 'three Michaels' - Mike Hodges, Michael Caine and Mike Klinger - may not have hit similar paydirt as with their GET CARTER, but the sheer knowing coolness of pulp writer Mickey King's (Caine) Chandleresque voiceover dialogue is carried off with caustic wit, panache and style ("The day started quietly enough, then I got up."); in fact, there are four Michaels if one adds Mickey Rooney - and a fifth if one includes the main character, Mickey King. Fearing possible stereotyping as a Hard Man, PULP was intended to be the opposite of Caine's hard-hitting Jack Carter character: affecting the relaxed raffish air of the self-satisfied ex-pat (he left London and his lucrative job as a funeral-director, and elbowed the wife and three kids), Mickey King glides about the Mediterranean in a dapper white corduroy suit, churning out cheap gangster fiction paperbacks under ludicrous aliases (Guy Strange, Gary Rough, Dan Wilde, Les Behan, newly-discovered Indian writer Dr. O.R. Gann, and struggling Nigerian author S. Ódomi) and hard-boiled titles (Kill Me Gently, The Kneetrembler and My Gun Is Long). In fact, his voiceover dialogue of heroic action is the opposite of his real-life reaction when confronted with dangerous situations - starting with a succession of taxis completely ignoring his hails!

Neatly filmed on Malta, G.C., the film is an odd joy from beginning to end, with little pastiches that are hommages to John Huston (the FBI agent who appears to be Bogart enquiring from whom appears to be Peter Lorre after what turns out to be a Maltese falcon ...) and wonderful quirky characters. King's publisher, Markovic, is "a Greco-Albanian born in Budapest" with a bladder problem. Obviously vegetarian, the Mysterious Englishman, Mr. Balmoral (Dennis Price), is reading Alice In Wonderland for the 118th time, and so well able to insult steak-eatin' folks from steak-lovin' Texas from it; could he be part of the developing mystery? Lionel Stander puts in a nice turn as a laid-back, ageing wiseguy ("His name was Ben Dinuccio. It was the nicest thing about him."). Starting at the Temples of Zonq, leggy Nadia Cassini (Liz Adams) shows why hotpants were - and still are! - great [Cassini went on to become a 1970s and 1980s starlet in Italian erotica and Trash flics]. Swarthy and moustachioed, Al Lettieri (Ben Miller) plays ... well, Al Lettieri, the stereotyped rôle he can never get away from: the 'heavy' - as he did in The Getaway and Mr. Majestyk - who dons the priest's garb and eventually meets with an undignified (for a heavy, that is) end. One of Gilbert's ex-wives, sexy-voiced Lizabeth Scott (Princess Betty Cippola) shmoozes suggestion as she knows The Establishment are really In Control of events (she calls her husband Dago).

But the real treat is Mickey Rooney as the faded film star, Preston Gilbert, ejected from Hollywood for his Mob associations. In a villa on a private island, with his deaf mother, companion Liz and his PR-man Dinuccio, semi-reclusive Gilbert lives the life of the wealthy idler reliving past glories by playing old 78s and corny soundbites from his Cagneyesque old gangster films, and inflicting practical jokes on unsuspecting tourists. Delightfully hamming it up, his poncing around in his skivvies [I creased-up at the double-mirror bit] and applying his toupée is a marvellous send-up of himself! With the Big Sleep approachin' Gilbert hires King to ghostwrite his lifestory plus a few revelations - "a death-rattle in paperpack, eh?" according to a sceptical King. Preston insists the book come with an opening quote from Samuel Goldwyn, "We all passed a lot of water since then."

Hodge's cutaway scenes show a nice eye for detail. Elections are due, so throughout there are street marches by elderly and not-very-impressive hangers-on of the New Front party of creepy law-and-order politician Prince Frank Cippola - a comment on then-topical real-life Prince Borghese and the quasi-establishment, certainly neo-Fascist, Spada movement. "The wizard ringing in," the dignified pain of ashamed former Partisan Signor Lepri, and the "retired gunman who drew too late - twice" supping cola at the 42nd Street Bar (King sits under a plaque saying Ave Maria) add to the quirky mystery.

Poignant are the closing scenes. Whilst King feverishly hammers out the imagined ending to his own ordeal (in which he re-uses passages from previous novels), Cippola's shooting-party have hounded a wild boar toward his shooting platform (in a scene that would be unacceptable today). Trapped, the wretched beast has nowhere to go. Safe from the boar's frantic attempts to charge the wire, it's an easy shot, no real competition. Having bagged his kill, unassailable aristocrat Cippola raises a glass of champagne to the camera. "I'll get you, you bastards ..." wails King, unable to scratch an itch ...

Yup, a gem.