Film Review: A Dry White Season (dir by Euzhan Palcy)

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1990, Marlon Brando received his final Academy Award nomination when he was nominated for his supporting performance in 1989’s A Dry White Season.

Brando played Ian McKenzie, a human rights lawyer who lives and work in South Africa at the height of the Apartheid regime. When we first see McKenzie, he’s sitting in his office and complaining about how all the flowers surrounding him have given him a permanent allergy. When Ben Du Toit (Donald Sutherland) explains that he’s trying to learn the truth about why his gardener and his gardener’s son both died in the custody of South Africa’s “special branch,” McKenzie replies that bringing the case would be a waste of time. McKenzie makes several dismissive comments about the case and tells Du Toit that pursing the matter would lead to Du Toit becoming a pariah himself. Only when Du Toit says that he’ll just find another lawyer to pursue the manner does McKenzie agree to take the case. His comments may have seemed callous but they were McKenzie’s way of testing Du Toit’s commitment to actually getting to the truth.

Up until the death of his gardener, Ben Du Toit was someone who blindly believed in the system. A former rugby star and a teacher, Ben grew up in South Africa and is proud to call himself a “true African.” (In one of the film’s best scenes, Ben’s driver, Stanley — played by Zakes Mokae, — informs Ben that being an African in South Africa means not being allowed to vote and having to carry identification papers everywhere with him.) When the gardener’s son is first arrested, Ben repeatedly says, “He must have done something.” When Ben’s gardener is arrested, Ben believes that it’s all just a terrible mistake and that he’ll be released soon. Even after the gardener is killed, Ben initially believes the official story that the death was a suicide. It’s only after Stanley takes Ben to the funeral home and shows him the gardener’s tortured body that Ben finally comes to realize that he was tortured to death by Captain Stolz (Jurgen Prochow).

Still, Ben is naive enough to assume that McKenzie will be able to get some sort of justice. In court, McKenzie easily exposes the flaws in Stolz’s story. When Stolz claims that the dead man’s injuries were the result of the man throwing himself against the bars of his cell, McKenzie mentions that the man’s back was injured and then asks if he was throwing himself backwards. Stolz smirks and says that the man was “an animal.” McKenzie may be a brilliant lawyer but it’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to lose the case. Stolz is exonerated and the expression on McKenzie’s face is one that indicate that he is not surprised at all.

It’s a small role. Brando gets less than ten minutes of screentime but he makes perfect use of them and shows that, even in the latter half of his career, Brando could still give a good performance when he cared about the material. Both Brando and Susan Sarandon took small roles in this anti-Apartheid drama because they believed in the message. Sarandon’s casting is a bit distracting. She never becomes the journalist she’s playing, instead she just seems like a movie star lending her name to a cause that she believes in. But Brando becomes Ian McKenzie and he expertly reveals the absurd lengths to which the Apartheid government will go to excuse its actions.

The majority of the film deals with Ben Du Toit and his slow-awakening about the truth of the country that he calls home. Upon realizing the truth about the country’s government and its actions, Du Toit declares that he can no longer go back to being who he once was and it costs him his family, his home, and ultimately his life. Donald Sutherland does a wonderful job, portraying Du Toit’s growing understanding of what’s actually happening in South Africa. Wisely, the film doesn’t portray Du Toit as being a saint. It fully understands that Du Toit only started to care about Apartheid when it effected somebody that he knew and fortunately, Stanley is always there to call Du Toit out whenever he starts to forget about his own role in supporting the system that he now opposes. It’s a powerful and heartfelt film, one that is well-known for Brando’s performance but works just as well when Brando is off-screen as well.

Film Review: Voyage of the Damned (dir by Stuart Rosenberg)

Posted on January 4, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1939, an ocean liner named the MS St. Louis set sail from Hamburg. Along with the crew, the ship carried 937 passengers, all of whom were Jewish and leaving Germany to escape Nazi persecution. The ship was meant to go to Havana, where the passengers had been told that they would be given asylum. Many were hoping to reunite with family members who had already taken the voyage.

What neither the passengers nor Captain Gustav Schroeder knew was that the entire voyage was merely a propaganda operation. No sooner had the St. Louis left Hamburg than German agents and Nazi sympathizers started to rile up anti-Semitic feelings in Cuba. The plan was to prevent the passengers from disembarking in Cuba and to force the St. Louis to then return to Germany. The Nazis would be able to claim that they had given the Jews a chance to leave but that the rest of the world would not take them in. Not only would the Jews be cast as pariahs but the Germans would be able to use the world’s actions as a way to defend their own crimes.

Captain Schroeder, however, refused to play along. After he was refused permission to dock in Cuba, he then attempted to take the ship to both America and Canada. When both of those countries refused to allow him to dock, Schroeder turned the St. Louis toward England, where he planned to stage a shipwreck so that the passengers could be rescued at sea. Before that happened, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom jointly announced that they would accept the refugees.

Tragically, just a few days after the passengers disembarked, World War II officially began and Belgium, France, and the Netherlands all fell to the Nazi war machine. It is estimated that, of the 937 passengers on the St. Louis, more than 600 of them subsequently died in the Nazi concentration camps.

The journey of the St. Louis was recreated in the 1976 film, Voyage of the Damned, with Max von Sydow as Captain Schroeder and a collection of familiar faces playing not only the ship’s passengers and crew but also the men and women in Cuba who all played a role in the fate of the ship. In fact, one could argue that there’s a few too many familiar faces in Voyage of the Damned. One cannot fault the performances of Max von Sydow, Malcolm McDowell, and Helmut Griem as members of the crew. And, amongst the passengers, Lee Grant, Jonathan Pryce, Paul Koslo, Sam Wanamaker, and Julie Harris all make a good impression. Even the glamorous Faye Dunaway doesn’t seem to be too out-of-place on the ship. But then, in Havana, actors like Orson Welles and James Mason are awkwardly cast as Cubans and the fact that they are very obviously not Cuban serves to take the viewer out of the story. It reminds the viewer that, as heart-breaking as the story of the St. Louis may be, they’re still just watching a movie.

That said, Voyage of the Damned still tells an important true story, one that deserves to be better-known. In its best moments, the film captures the helplessness of having nowhere to go. With Cuba corrupt and the rest of the world more interested in maintaining the illusion of peace than seriously confronting what was happening in Germany, the Jewish passengers of the St. Louis truly find themselves as a people without a home. They also discover that they cannot depend on leaders the other nations of the world to defend them.

Defending the passengers falls to a few people who are willing to defy the leaders of their own country. At the start of the film, Nazi Intelligence Chief Wilhelm Canaris (Denholm Elliott) explains that Captain Schroeder was selected specifically because he wasn’t a member of the Nazi Party and could not be accused of having ulterior motives for ultimately returning the passengers to Germany. Canaris and his fellow Nazis assume that anti-Semitism is so natural that even a non-Nazi will not care what happens to the Jewish passengers. Instead, Schroeder and his crew take it upon themselves to save the lives of the passengers. It is not Franklin Roosevelt who tries to save the passengers of St. Louis. Instead, it’s just a handful of people who, despite unrelenting pressure to do otherwise, step up to do the right thing. Max von Sydow, who was so often cast in villainous roles, gives a strong performance as the captain who is willing to sacrifice his ship to save his passengers.

Flaws and all, Voyage of the Damned is a powerful film about a moment in history that must never be forgotten.

Horror Film Review: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (dir by Roy Ward Baker)

Posted on October 15, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our more frequent readers may remember, I shared the 1974 Dracula-martial arts hybrid The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires as one of our horrors on the lens last October. Judging from the comments that I got last year, this was apparently one of the more popular films that we featured.

And why not? The film is one of those rather ludicrous movies that really could have only been made in the early 1970s. It combines two genres that really should not go together — martial arts and the Hammer Dracula series — and somehow, it all works. Don’t get me wrong. The film doesn’t make a bit of sense. I’ve seen it a few times and I still have a hard time following just what exactly is going on. But you don’t watch a film called The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires for the plot. This is one of those movies that you watch for the style. Fortunately, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is all about style.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is the final entry in Hammer’s Dracula series. Or, at least, it might be. It all depends on whether or not you consider 7 Golden Vampires to actually be a part of the series. I do but quite a few people don’t.

Why the controversy?

Well, first off, Christopher Lee does not appear in this film. Much as he did with Brides of Dracula, Lee read the script and announced that he would not be returning to play Dracula. Of course, when Lee refused to appear in Brides of Dracula, Hammer responded by creating an entirely new vampire for Prof. Van Helsing to battle. This time, however, they simply recast the role. An actor by the name of John Forbes-Robertson took on the role of Dracula and, unfortunately, he gave a rather bland and unmemorable performance. If Lee’s Dracula seemed to be motivated by rage, Forbes-Robertson is merely petulant.

The other issue that purists have with the film is that it violates the continuity of the previous Dracula films. The film opens in 1805 and features Dracula leaving his castle for China, where he will spend the next 100 years as the leader of the infamous 7 Golden Vampires. The problem with this, of course, is that there had already been 7 other films that established that Dracula spent the 19th Century going between England and Eastern Europe.

It would be easy to declare that 7 Golden Vampires has nothing to do with the other Hammer Films except for the fact that Peter Cushing returns of Prof. Van Helsing. When the film opens, Van Helsing is in China, lecturing to skeptical students about the legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. After one lecture, Van Helsing is approached by a man (David Chiang), who explains that the 7 Golden Vampires have been attacking his village. Van Helsing agrees to help the man vanquish the 7 Golden Vampires and, along the way to the village, he even tells some stories about his previous battles with Dracula.

So, here’s my theory. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires does take place in the same continuity as the Christopher Lee Dracula films but I do not believe that the vampire played by Forbes-Robertson is actually Dracula. I think he’s just an upstart who has claimed the infamous name while the actual Dracula is inconvenienced.

As for the film itself, it works far better than you might expect. At the time 7 Golden Vampires went into production, Hammer was struggling to survive with their once racy products now seen as being rather tame when compared to what other studios were releasing. 7 Golden Vampires was a co-production between Hammer and the Shaw Brothers, which means that the film was full all of the gothic trappings that I love about Hammer while also featuring all of the martial arts action that fans of the Shaw Brothers would have expected. It’s an odd combination that works exactly because it is so unexpected.

Finally, one word about the 7 Golden Vampires. Not only are they far more desiccated than the average Hammer vampire but whenever they ride up on their horses, they’re filmed in slow motion, just like the zombies from Amando De Ossorio’s Blind Dead films. As a result, those 7 Golden Vampires are pure nightmare fuel.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires may have been the final entry in Hammer’s Dracula franchise but at least the series went out on a memorable note.