On-Stage On The Lens: Hamlet From The Lunt-Fontaine Theater (dir by Bill Colleran and John Gielgud)

Posted on October 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

That Richard Burton is today best-remembered for his tumultuous marriages to Elizabeth Taylor and for his performances in several less-than-worthy films is unfortunate as Burton was also one of the most highly regarded staged actors of his generation. In fact, late in his life, Burton often expressed regret that he had ever left the stage for films to begin with.

In 1964, Burton played Hamlet on Broadway, in a production that was directed by John Gielgud. (Gielgud also provided the voice of the Ghost.) This is a video-recording of both that production and Burton’s acclaimed performance. Burton brings an intense and almost divine madness to the role. Watching, one can see why Burton would have preferred to have been remembered for this instead of for playing Mark Antony.

Lisa Marie Reviews An Oscar Nominee: The Elephant Man (dir by David Lynch)

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Elephant Man (1980, dir by David Lynch, DP: Freddie Francis)

David Lynch never won a competitive Oscar.

He received an honorary award from the Academy in 2019. He generated some minor but hopeful buzz as a possible nominee for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. He was nominated for Best Director three times and once for Best Adapted Screenplay. But he never won an Oscar and indeed, even his nominations felt like they were given almost begrudgingly on the part of the Academy. In an industry that celebrated conformity and put the box office before all other concerns, David Lynch was an iconoclastic contrarian and the Academy often didn’t do know what to make of him. Of the many worthy films that he directed, only one David Lynch film was nominated for Best Picture and, in my opinion, it should have won.

1980’s The Elephant Man is based on the true story of Joseph Merrick (renamed John for the film), a man who was horribly deformed and terribly abused until he was saved from a freak show by a surgeon named Dr. Frederick Treves. The sensitive and intelligent Merrick went on to become a celebrity in Victorian London, visited by members of high society and allowed to live at London Hospital. (Even members of the royal family dropped in to visit the man who had once been forced to live in a cage.) Merrick lived to be 27 years old, ultimately dying of asphyxiation when he attempted to lie down and, in Treves’s opinion, sleep like a “normal person” despite his oversized and heavy head. In the film, Merrick is played by John Hurt (who gives a wonderful performance that, despite Hurt acting under a ton on makeup, still perfectly communicates Merrick’s humanity) while Treves is played by Anthony Hopkins, who is equally as good as Hurt. (Hurt was nominated for Best Actor but Hopkins was not. Personally, I prefer Hopkins’s performance as the genuinely kind Dr. Treves to any of his more-rewarded work as Dr. Lecter.) The rest of the cast is made up of veteran British stars, including John Gielgud, Wendy Hiller, Freddie Jones, and Kenny Baker.

Lynch’s version of The Elephant Man is only loosely based on the facts of Merrick’s life. It opens with a disturbing fantasy sequence (one which I assume is meant to be from Merrick’s point of view) in which a herd of elephants strike down Merrick’s mother and then appear to assault her. Shot in stark black-and-white and often featuring the sounds of droning machinery in the background (in many ways, The Elephant Man feels like it takes place in the same world as Eraserhead), the first half of The Elephant Man feels like a particularly surreal Hammer film. (Veteran Hammer director Freddie Francis served as The Elephant Man‘s cinematographer.) Merrick is kept off-camera and, when we finally do see his face, it’s in a split-second scene in which Merrick is as terrified as the person who sees him. Before we really meet Merrick, we’ve already heard Treves and the hospital administrator (John Gielgud) discuss all of the clinical details of his condition. We know why he’s deformed. After we see him, we know how he’s deformed. After all of that, the audience is finally ready to know Merrick the human being. Without engaging in too much obvious sentimentality, Lynch shows us that Merrick is a kind soul, one who has been tragically mistreated by the world. Just as with the real Merrick, almost everyone who meets the film’s John Merrick is ultimately charmed by him. In the film, Merrick is kidnapped by his former owner, the alcoholic Bytes (Freddie Jones), who wants again puts Merrick on display in a cage. In the end, it’s Merrick’s fellow so-called “freaks” who set him free and allow him to return to the hospital, where he has one final vision of his mother. This vision is a much less disturbing than the one that opened the film. The film celebrates the humanity of John Merrick but is also reveals the genius of David Lynch. There’s so many moments when the film could have gone off the rails or become too obvious for its own good. But Lynch’s unique style so draws you into the film’s world that even the mysterious visions of his mother somehow feel completely necessary and natural. The Elephant Man is the David Lynch film that makes me cry. Lynch was a surrealist with a heart.

The Elephant Man was only David Lynch’s second film. He was hired to direct by none other than Mel Brooks, who produced the film but went uncredited to prevent people from thinking it would be a comedy. (Lynch, however, did cast Brooks’s wife, Anne Bancroft, as an actress who visits Merrick.) Brooks hired Lynch after seeing Eraserhead and recognizing a talent that many in Hollywood would never have had the guts to take a chance on. (Despite the success of Eraserhead on the midnight circuit, David Lynch was working as a roofer when he was offered The Elephant Man and had nearly given up on the idea of ever making another film.) Reportedly, Brooks stayed out of Lynch’s way and protected him from other executives who fears Lynch’s version of the story would be too strange to be a success. Lynch and Brooks proved those doubters wrong. Acclaimed by critics and popular with audiences, The Elephant Man was nominated for Best Picture and David Lynch was nominated for Best Director. I like Ordinary People. I like Raging Bull. But The Elephant Man was the film that should have won in 1980.

The Elephant Man remains a powerful movie and an example of how an independent artist can make a mainstream movie without compromising his vision. (Of course, I imagine it helps to have a producer who has the intelligence and faith necessary to stay out of your way.) David Lynch may be gone but his art will live forever. The Elephant Man will continue to make me cry for the rest of my life and for that, I’m thankful.

The Elephant Man (1980, dir by David Lynch, DP: Freddie Francis)

Film Review: The Shoes of The Fisherman (dir by Michael Anderson)

Posted on January 5, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1968 film, The Shoes of The Fisherman, opens in a snowy Siberian labor camp. For the past twenty years, this camp has been the home of Kiril Pavlovich Lakota (Anthony Quinn), the Ukrainian archbishop of Liviv. Kiril is unexpectedly released by Russia’s new leader, Piotr Ilyich Kamenev (a very British Laurence Olivier). After explaining to Kiril that Russia and China are on the verge of nuclear war due to a famine that has been instigated by U.S. sanctions, Kamenev tells Kiril that he is being released on the condition that he tell no one about the conditions at the Russian labor camp. Kiril starts to protest just for Father Telemond (Oskar Werner), the Vatican’s representative, to say that the conditions have already been agreed to.

In Rome, Kiril meets the Pope (John Gielgud), who makes the humble Kiril a cardinal, over Kiril’s objections that he just a “simple man.” Later, when the aged Pope suddenly dies, Kiril is unexpectedly elected, as a compromise candidate, to succeed him. Still humble and considering himself to be a simple man with a simple mission, Kiril suddenly finds himself as one of the most revered and powerful men on the planet. With Father Telemond as his secretary, Kiril tries to make the Vatican responsive to the needs of the people and sets out to bring peace between the Russians and the Chinese. That turns out to be easier said than done, especially when Telemond himself is eventually accused of heresy for his progressive views.

(And yes, Telemond is a Jesuit….)

The Shoes of the Fisherman is a type of film that should be familiar to anyone who has any knowledge of the Hollywood studios in the 60s. It’s the type of big and self-serious film that was meant to tell audiences, “You won’t find anything this opulent and important on television!” The cast is designed to appeal to everyone. Anthony Quinn and Laurence Olivier are there for the older viewers (especially the older viewers who made up the majority of the Oscar voters in 1968) while, for the younger voters, there’s handsome Oskar Werner as a Jesuit who interpretation of the Gospels is so radical that even Pope Francis would probably tell him to step back a little. For the older, anti-communist viewers, there are scenes that portray the harsh conditions at a Siberian labor camp. The commies put Kiril in prison so he must be one of the good guys. And for the younger, more liberal viewers, there was the suggestion that the threat of World War III was largely due to the actions of the American government. And, just in case there was still anyone who thought that television was preferable to a prestige picture, TV star David Janssen shows up as a cynical reporter whose wife (played by Barbara Jefford) is a doctor who Kiril helps to get some medicine for one of her dying patients. Director Michael Anderson includes enough sudden zoom shots to let younger viewers know that he’s with them while still directing in a stately enough manner to appeal to the older viewers.

The end result is a film that is big and grand but also rather slow. The film gets bogged down in subplots that don’t really add much to the overall story. We spend way too much time with the reporter and his wife. Anthony Quinn does a good enough job as Kiril, giving a rather subdued performance by Quinn standards. (A scene where Kiril recites a Jewish prayer for a dying man is wonderfully acted by Quinn, who seems to truly be emotionally invested in the film’s message of togetherness.) Laurence Olivier is not at all convincing as a Russian but still, he has the stately bearing of a man used to being in power. Like many of the studio productions of the late 60s, The Shoes of The Fisherman tries a bit too hard to strike a balance between old school Hollywood and the counterculture and the film ultimately feels rather wishy-washy as a result. It’s a noble film with good intentions but it’s not particularly memorable.

The TSL Grindhouse: Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (dir by Tinto Brass)

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

How many cuts do we need of a bad movie?

Caligula is a film with a long and storied history. In the mid-1970s, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione wanted to follow the lead of his rival, Hugh Hefner, and get into the movie business. His plan was to make an explicit adult film with high production values, one that could be sold as a mainstream feature film. He decided that the infamously decadent Roman Emperor Caligula would be the subject of his film. In order to give the project some gravitas, he accepted scripts from both Lina Wertmuller and Gore Vidal. Ultimately, he chose to go with Vidal’s script because Vidal’s name had more cultural cachet than Wertmuller’s. It certainly wasn’t because he liked Vidal’s script, which Vidal later said featured a lot of gay sex but only one scene of heterosexual coupling.

With the promise that Caligula would be a classy production that would push the boundaries of cinematic sex without actually being pornographic, Guccione was able to bring together a truly impressive cast of actors. Malcolm McDowell agreed to play Caligula. Helen Mirren was cast as Caligula’s wife, Caesonia. John Gielgud took on the role of Nerva the philosopher while Peter O’Toole was cast as the diseased Emperor Tiberius. Guccione offered directing duties to John Huston and Lina Wertmuller. In the end, no matter how much money he was willing to spend or how distinguished a cast he had assembled, Guccione could not find a prominent, mainstream director who was willing to work with him. Guccione ended up hiring a director he knew little about, an Italian arthouse filmmaker named Tinto Brass.

Brass proceeded to rewrite Vidal’s script. Brass’s version of the film featured more sex and less politics. Guccione was happy about that until he discovered that Brass’s plan was to direct the sex scenes to be grotesque and disturbing. To his horror, Guccione discovered that Brass was essentially parodying the type of film that Guccione wanted him to direct. Even when Guccione insisted that the latest “Penthouse pets” be cast in the film, Brass tried to keep them in the background. As Guccione’s demands grew, Brass responded by refusing to emphasize the ornate and very expensive sets that Guccione had paid to have created. A working ship was built but Brass reportedly chose to put it in a small warehouse so that there would never be room to get a full shot of it. Guccione responded by taking the film away in post-production and inserting several hardcore sex scenes, which upset the members of the cast who did not sign on to appear in a pornographic film.

As for the film itself, it must be said that Caligula is probably one of the most historically accurate portrayals of ancient Rome. The city was said to be a mix of dirty streets and ornate palaces and Caligula certainly captured the mix of beauty and sordid decadence that was the Roman Empire. The film’s plot actually sticks very closely to what was written about Caligula by Roman historians like Suetonius. Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell both give strong performances, even if McDowell later claimed the film ruined his career by typecasting him as a perverse villain. Peter O’Toole is memorably grotesque as Tiberius. Exploitation vets John Steiner and Teresa Ann Savoy also make an impression in their roles and one gets the feeling that they both understood what type of film they were appearing in, even if the bigger names in the cast did not. There are moments of shocking grandeur and visual beauty to be found in Caligula and also moments of such total ugliness that they are difficult to watch. In many ways, Caligula is what Guccione wanted. It’s a big, expensive film that tests boundaries and features explicit sex.

But, Good God, is it ever boring! Seriously, the scene where Caligula visits Tiberius in Capri goes on forever. Despite McDowell’s strong performance, Caligula is not a particularly compelling character. He becomes emperor and then he goes mad. For over two hours, Caligula does one terrible thing after another and there’s only so long that you can watch it before you just want someone to hurry up and kill him. The film suggests that Caligula was rebelling against the Roman establishment but, in the end, who cares? He kills his friends. He has sex with his sister. In the film’s most disturbing scene, he rapes a bride and then fists the groom. It just goes on and on and it gets old pretty quickly.

Still, there’s always been a lot of debate over whether or not it would be possible to make Caligula into a good film. Bob Guccione claimed that he saved the film. Tinto Brass disagreed and his director’s cut, which takes out Guccione’s hardcore inserts, is considerably better-paced than the Guccione version but the nonstop ugliness still gets rather boring.

That brings us to the latest version of Caligula, the Ultimate Cut. Assembled without the input of Tinto Brass or the deceased Bob Guccione, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut played at Cannes in 2023 and was given a limited release by Drafthouse Films in 2024. It was largely assembled out of unused footage and alternate takes. I’ve read that not a single fame from the original version of Caligula is in The Ultimate Cut but I don’t think that’s quite true. (The scene with the giant beheading machine appears to be the same footage that appeared in the original version.) Caligula: The Ultimate Cut removes all of Guccione’s hardcore footage but it also downplays a lot of Brass’s directorial flourishes as well. Instead, The Ultimate Cut is said to much more closely follow Gore Vidal’s vision of the film.

Is the Ultimate Cut any good? It definitely looks better than the previous version of Caligula. The restoration makes Rome into a very colorful city. There’s a bit more humor to McDowell’s performance in the Ultimate Cut. While his version of Caligula still becomes a monster (and the wedding rape is still included in the film), he starts out as a clown whose mission is to humiliate the Roman establishment in much the same way that Tiberius used to humiliate him. In The Ultimate Cut, Caligula is much more of an anarchist. At the same time, the Ultimate Cut features a bit less of John Steiner as the duplicitous Longinus and that’s a shame because Steiner’s performance was one of the best in the original version. As well, Helen Mirren’s performance is stronger in the original version than in The Ultimate Cut. The alternate takes that were used in The Ultimate Cut often seem to favor McDowell over Mirren.

That said, The Ultimate Cut is still a bit of an endurance test. Caligula’s meeting with Tiberius still goes on forever and the nonstop evil of his reign still gets a bit dull after a while. It turns out that Caligula the Anarchist is no more compelling than Caligula the Madman. Brass and even Guccione may have had a point with the original version of Caligula. Caligula is a film that requires a truly sordid and shameless sensibility to be interesting.

In the end, it’s hard not to feel that all of this could have been avoided if Gemellus had been named emperor.

Film Review: Lost Horizon (dir by Charles Jarrott)

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Friends forever. It’s a nice idea.”

With those words, the late Casey Kasem closed out the infamous “Rockumentary” episode of Saved By The Bell. In this episode, Zack Morris fell asleep in his garage while waiting for his high school friends to arrive for band rehearsal. While he was asleep, he dreamt about becoming a superstar as the result of Zack Attack’s hit song, Friends Forever. Later, of course, Zack was led astray by a publicist who tried to sell him as being a “male Madonna.” Zack didn’t care about the fame. He was more concerned that the music and the lights at his concert were so excessive that the audience couldn’t even hear his lyrics. Because, seriously, when you’re coming up with banger lyrics like “We’ll be friends forever/yes we will,” you want to make sure that they can clearly be heard.

It’s easy to make fun of the band and the show but that doesn’t make Casey Kasem’s words any less true. Friends forever. It is a nice idea. It’s also a totally unrealistic and implausible idea. People grow apart. People develop new interests. People move to different towns. Sometimes, people just decided that they need to take a little break from the same old thing. Instead of demanding that people remain friends forever, it would perhaps be more realistic to encourage people to enjoy and treasure the time that they have in the present. But, to be honest, entertainment is not about that type of reality. No one wants to hear, “Be friends until you get bored.” Instead, they want to hear “Friends forever!” It’s a simple idea and the simple ideas are the ones that usually bring us the most comfort.

Take the idea behind Shangri-La, for instance. Shangri-La was a utopia that was hidden away in the Himalayas. It was a place where there was no war, no greed, and everyone was in nearly perfect health. It was a place where it was common for people to live to be well over a hundred years old. It’s a place where people literally can be friends forever. And while the place does have one very big drawback — i.e., once you decide to stay there, you can’t return to the outside world for even so much as a brief visit — it’s still easy to see why this idealized existence would appeal to many people.

The lamasery of Shangri-La was first introduced in a 1933 novel called Lost Horizon. Written by James Hilton, Lost Horizon told the story of a group of westerners who, fleeing from a political uprising in India, find themselves in Shangri-La. That the novel’s portrayal of a peaceful utopia hidden away from the “modern world” proved to be popular should not come as a surprise. In 1933, the world was still recovering from the Great War. Much of Europe was still in ruins, both economically and physically. The combination of the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic had shaken everyone’s faith in the future. Even as a group of idealistic activists, industrialists, and politicians tried to make war illegal, Mussolini seized power in Italy. Spain was on the verge of civil war. In Germany, a fanatical anti-Semite named Adolf Hitler had managed to move from being a fringe politician to being named chancellor. The U.S. was suffering from the Great Depression. Even the UK was so mired in political turmoil that it was no longer a reliable bulwark against chaos. To the readers who were having to deal with all of that on a daily basis, the idea of Shangri-La was an inviting one.

(One of those readers was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who named his presidential retreat Shangri-La. Years later, Dwight Eisenhower would rename Shangri-La after his son and it’s remained Camp David ever since.)

Not surprisingly, the book’s success led to it being adapted for the movies. Frank Capra took the first crack at it, release his film version in 1937. At the time, Capra’s adaptation was the most expensive film to have ever come out of Hollywood. (It cost $1.6 million dollars!) It also underperformed at the box office, nearly bankrupting Colombia Pictures. Even though the film itself was nominated for Best Picture of the year, it still took five years for the film to earn back its cost. Because Colombia edited the film to shorten its lengthy running time, Capra sued the studio and the end result was that everyone involved lost a good deal of money. Considering all of the bad luck that befell the first production, one might wonder why Hollywood would even risk making a second version of the film. And indeed, it would be several decades before any major studio attempted to bring Hilton’s novel back to the screen, despite the fact that the idea behind Shangri-La was probably looking more attractive with each crisis-filled day.

Ross Hunter

In 1973, producer Ross Hunter was sleeping on a mountain of cash. Well, perhaps he wasn’t but a look at some of the films that he had produced would definitely suggest that he could have if he had so chosen. Hunter started his career producing melodramas that starred Rock Hudson and were often directed by Douglas Sirk. He was the type of producer who understood that importance of glitz and glamour, especially with the film industry facing a new competitor named television. In the 60s, he made films that were totally out-of-touch with the turmoil of the decade but which still appealed to middle-aged viewers who wanted an escape from the hippies and the assassins. In 1970, he scored his biggest hit of all time when he produced Airport. As dull as that film seems to us today, it was the biggest hit of 1970 and it also gave birth to the disaster genre. (It was also the only Ross Hunter production to be nominated for Best Picture.)

It was after the success of Airport that Ross Hunter decided to produce a remake of Lost Horizon. Following the approach that he used in Airport he gathered an all-star cast. In fact, George Kennedy appeared in both Airport and Lost Horizon! Joining Kennedy were Oscar nominees Sally Kellerman, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Peter Finch, and Liv Ullmann. Michael York, fresh off of Cabaret, and Olivia Hussey, who was best-known for playing Juliet in the wildly successful 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet, were cast as rebellious lovers who tried to escape the paradise of Shangri-La. Larry Kramer, the future playwright and political activist, was hired to write the script. Charles Jarrott, who specialized in big, glossy films and who had been nominated for Best Director for his work on Anne of a Thousand Days, was brought in to direct. And Burt Bacharach was enlisted to write the song because, on top of being a literary adaptation with an all-star cast, Lost Horizon was also going to be a musical.

What could go wrong?

What indeed.

The 1973 version of Lost Horizon opens with an endless aerial view of the Himalayas. In the background, singers sing about peace and love. “There’s a lost horizon/waiting to be found/where the sound of guns/don’t pound in your ears/anymore,” the singers repeat several times, as if to hammer home the fact that the audience is not about to get Burt Bacharach at his best.

When the opening credits finally end, we find ourselves at an airport. A very non-musical protest has broken out. The characters in the film describe it as a revolution but instead, it just looks like a bunch of confused extras standing on a landing strip. When it comes to an epic film like this, it’s always a good idea to see what the extras are doing. In a good film, the extras will actually be a part of the world onscreen and you won’t even think of them as being a crowd of paid performers. In a bad film, like this one, they’ll all stand around in a perfectly organized group and they’ll all do the exact the same thing at the same time, like shaking their fists at a plane.

Despite all of the “drama” at the airport, one airplane does manage to take off. On the plane are the Conways, diplomat Richard (Peter Finch) and his younger brother, George (Michael York, whose blond prettiness suggests that there’s not a chance he could share any DNA with the much more rough-hewn Peter Finch). There’s also a Newsweek photographer named Sally Hughes (Sally Kellerman), who pops pills and who suffers from a pronounced case of ennui. She describes her job as “taking pictures of the headless so that people with heads can look at them in magazines while getting their hair done.” (Damn, Newsweek apparently used to be really messed up publication!) Sam Cornelius (George Kennedy) is an engineer and an embezzler. And finally, there’s Harry Lovett (Bobby Van), who introduces himself to everyone as being “Harry Lovett, the comedian.” Harry was playing an USO show when the revolution broke out and apparently, he was abandoned in the country because his act was so bad. Is the film suggesting that, in 1973, the United States would actually abandon a citizen in a dangerous, war-torn country? I hope someone impeaches that President Nixon!

Our heroes may think that they’re escaping to freedom but it turns out that the plane is actually being hijacked! One thing leads to another and eventually, as happens in all good musicals, the plane cashes in a remote area of the Himalayas. At first, it seems like our heroes are done for but, fortunately, they’re discovered by Chang (the very British John Gielgud) and a group of Shangri-La monks. Chang leads the party through the snowy mountains and eventually, they arrive at what appears to be a Disney resort but what we’re told is actually Shangri-La, a tropical paradise that sits in the middle of one of the most dangerous places on Earth!

Shangri-La has something for everyone:

Sally gets off drugs and discovers a library that, oddly enough, has every book ever written even though no one knows where Shangri-La is, none of the inhabitants can leave the area without running the risk of rapidly again, and Amazon wasn’t a thing in 1973.

Sam discovers a gold mine but, realizing that money doesn’t matter, he instead uses his engineering skills to help out the farmers of Shangri-La. It really didn’t appear that the farmers of Shangri-La needed any help but whatever, I guess. As long as Sam is happy.

Harry Lovett becomes a big star as the children of Shangri-La love his comedy. Children are well-known for their lack of taste when it comes to comedy.

Richard not only falls in love with the local teacher (Ingmar Bergman’s muse, Liv Ullman) but he also meets the High Lama (the very French Charles Boyer). It turns out that the High Lama is finally going to die and that he’s determined that Richard is the man who is destined to take over Shangri-Law, despite the fact that Richard has only recently arrived and isn’t even a Buddhist.

In fact, almost everyone is so happy that they start to sing and dance! It takes 50 minutes for the film to reach its first big musical number. Unfortunately, there’s a reason why most successful film musicals open with a big number instead of holding off on it. It’s important to, early on, get the audience used to the idea that they’re watching a film set in a world where it’s perfectly common for people to break out into song. From West Side Story to La La Land, good musicals have understood the importance of bringing the audience in early. Lost Horizon waits until everyone has gotten used to the film being a somewhat rudimentary adventure/disaster film before suddenly springing the singing and the dancing on everyone. It’s a bit jarring. It wouldn’t matter, of course, if the songs were any good but again, this was not Burt Bacharach’s finest moment.

Unfortunately, one member of the group doesn’t want to stay in Shangri-La and dance and sing. George Conway does not want to be friends forever. Instead, he’s fallen in love with the local librarian, Maria (Olivia Hussey). Maria dreams of seeing New York and London. George is determined to grant her wish, despite being told that Maria is nearly as old as John Gielgud and will start to age as soon as she leaves Shangri-La. Richard feels an obligation to accompany his brother. Needless to say, things don’t go well. (As Michael York would later put it himself, “There is noooo sanctuary….”) Will Richard be able to find his way back to Shangri-La?

“Let’s not go to Camelot, ’tis a silly place,” King Arthur famously declared in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Lost Horizon suffers the opposite problem. While Lost Horizon’s Shangri-La is occasionally a silly place, it’s usually just an incredibly boring place. One can’t help but feel that Maria has a point, regardless how much time Sally spends singing about her hatred of the New York night life. The film’s downfall is that it argues for Shangri-La being viewed an ideal without making Shangri-La into any place that you would want to visit. Add in the anemic songs and the confused performances and Charles Jarrot’s inability to maintain any sort of compelling pace and you have a film that’s too dull to really even qualify as a fun bad film. It’s just bad.

That said, much like friends forever, Shangri-La is a nice idea.

Julius Caesar (1970, directed by Stuart Burge)

Posted on September 13, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

In ancient Rome, under the direction of Cassius (Richard Johnson), several members of the Senate conspire to kill Julius Caesar (John Gielgud), believing that his death is the only way to preserve the Republic. Even Caesar’s longtime friend, Brutus (Jason Robards), is brought into the conspiracy. Unfortunately for the conspirators, after Caesar’s murder, Mark Antony (Charlton Heston) gives his famous speech asking the Romans to lend him their ears and the Roman citizens turn against Caesar’s murderers and instead look to Antony and Octavius (Richard Chamberlain) to lead them.

This was the first adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play to be filmed in color and the assassination of Caesar was portrayed much more graphically than in previous productions. By the end of the attack, Caesar has been stabbed so many times and there’s so much blood on screen that it doesn’t seem like he should even have the strength to say, “Et tu, Brute?” Despite the then-modern innovations, this version still feels creaky and stiff. When Caesar makes his appearance on the Ides of March, all of the conspirators actually stand in a neat line while Caesar enters the Senate. When Mark Anthony and Brutus make their speeches, the extras playing the Roman citizens looked bored and disinterested.

For most viewers, the appeal of this version of Julius Caesar will be for the cast, which was considered to be all-star in 1970. Along with Gielgud, Robards, Heston, Johnson, and Chamberlain, the cast also features Robert Vaughn as Casca, Christopher Lee as Artemidorous, Jill Bennett as Calpurnia, and Diana Rigg as Portia. Surprisingly, it’s Jason Robards, the Broadway veteran, who struggles with Shakespeare’s dialogue, delivering his lines flatly and without much emotion. Meanwhile, Charlton Heston steals the entire film as Mark Antony, nailing Antony’s funeral oration and proving himself to be much more clever than the conspirators had originally assumed. (Of course, Mark Antony was the Charlton Heston of his day so I guess it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that Heston is perfect in the role.) I also liked Diana Rigg’s performance in the small role of Portia and Robert Vaughn’s devious interpretation of Casca.

Though he plays Caesar here, John Gielgud previously played Cassius in the 1953 version of Julius Caesar, the one with James Mason and Marlon Brando. That is still the version to watch if you want to see the definitive adaptation of Julius Caesar.

Film Review: Murder on the Orient Express (dir by Sidney Lumet)

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

There’s been a murder on the Orient Express!

In the middle of the night, a shady American businessman (Richard Widmark) was stabbed to death. Now, with the train momentarily stalled due to a blizzard, its up to the world’s greatest detective, Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney), to solve the crime. With only hours to go before the snow is cleared off the tracks and the case is handed over to the local authorities, Hercule must work with Bianchi (Martin Balsam) and Dr. Constantine (George Coulouris) to figure out who among the all-star cast is a murderer.

Is it the neurotic missionary played by Ingrid Bergman? Is it the diplomat played by Michael York or his wife, played by Jacqueline Bisset? Is it the military man played by Sean Connery? How about Anthony Perkins or John Gielgud? Maybe it’s Lauren Bacall or could it be Wendy Hiller or Rachel Roberts or even Vanessa Redgrave? Who could it be and how are they linked to a previous kidnapping, one that led to the murder of an infant and the subsequent death of everyone else in the household?

Well, the obvious answer, of course, is that it had to be Sean Connery, right? I mean, we’ve all seen From Russia With Love. We know what that man is capable of doing on a train. Or what about Dr. No? Connery shot a man in cold blood in that one and then he smirked about it. Now, obviously, Connery was playing James Bond in those films but still, from the minute we see him in Murder on the Orient Express, we know that he’s a potential killer. At the height of his career, Connery had the look of a killer. A sexy killer, but a killer nonetheless….

Actually, the solution to the mystery is a bit more complicated but you already knew that. One of the more challenging things about watching the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express is that, in all probability, the viewer will already know how the victim came to be dead. As convoluted as the plot may be, the solution is also famous enough that even those who haven’t seen the 1974 film, the remake, or read Agatha Christie’s original novel will probably already know what Poirot is going to discover.

That was something that director Sidney Lumet obviously understood. Hence, instead of focusing on the mystery, he focuses on the performers. His version of Murder on the Orient Express is full of character actors who, along with being talented, were also theatrical in the best possible way. The film is essentially a series of monologues, with each actor getting a few minutes to show off before Poirot stepped up to explain what had happened. None of the performances are exactly subtle but it doesn’t matter because everyone appears to be having a good time. (Finney, in particular, seems to fall in love with his occasionally indecipherable accent.) Any film that has Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Albert Finney all acting up a storm is going to be entertaining to watch.

Though it’s been a bit overshadowed by the Kenneth Branagh version, the original Murder on the Orient Express holds up well. I have to admit that Sidney Lumet always seems like he would have been a bit of an odd choice to direct this film. I mean, just consider that he made this film in-between directing Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. However, Lumet pulls it off, largely by staying out of the way of his amazing cast and letting them act up a storm. It looks like it was a fun movie to shoot. It’s certainly a fun movie to watch, even if we do already know the solution.

A Herman Wouk Double Feature: The Winds of War (1983, directed by Dan Curtis) and War and Remembrance (1988, directed by Dan Curtis)

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

When the great American novelist Herman Wouk passed away earlier this month at the age of 103, he left behind a rich and varied literary legacy. From 1947, the year that his first novel was published to 2016, the year that he published his memoirs, Wouk wrote about religion, history, science, and even the movies. However, Wouk will probably always be best remembered for the three novels that he wrote about World War II.

Based on his own Naval service during World War II, The Caine Mutiny was published in 1951 and was later adapted into both a successful stage play and an Oscar-nominated film. It also won Wouk a Pulitzer Prize and established him as a major American writer. Nearly 20 years later, Wouk would return to the history of the Second World War with two of his greatest literary works, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. (Originally, Wouk was only planning on writing one book about the entire war but when it took him nearly a thousand pages to reach Pearl Harbor, he decided to split the story in two.) Beginning in 1939 and proceeding all the way through to the end of the war, the two books followed two families, the Henrys and the Jastrows, as they watched the world descend into war. Along the way, the book’s fictional characters rub shoulders with historical characters like Hitler, Churchill, FDR, and even Stalin. Carefully researched and meticulously detailed, the books were both critically acclaimed and popular with readers and, despite some soapy elements, they both hold up well today.

Given their success, it’s not a surprise that both The Winds of War and War and Remembrance were adapted for television. Today, HBO would probably give the books the Game of Thrones treatment, with 8 seasons of war, tragedy, romance, and Emmys. However, this was the 1980s. This was the age of of the big-budget, all-star cast network miniseries. Wouk’s epic history of World War II was coming to prime time.

With a total running times of 15 hours, The Winds of War originally aired over seven evenings in 1983. Produced and directed for ABC by Dan Curtis, The Winds of War had a 962-page script, a 200-day shooting schedule, 285 speaking parts, and a then-record budget of $35,000,000. It also had Robert Mitchum, starring as Victor “Pug” Henry, an ambitious naval officer who somehow always managed to be in the right place to witness almost all of the events leading up to America’s entry into World War II. Jan-Michael Vincent played Pug’s son, Byron, while John Houseman took on the pivotal role Aaron Jastrow, a Jewish scholar though whose eyes the home audience would witness the rise of fascism in Europe. Terribly miscast as Natalie, Aaron’s niece and Byron’s lover, was 44 year-old Ali MacGraw. Among those playing historical figures were Ralph Bellamy as FDR, Howard Lang as Churchill, and Gunter Meisner as Hitler.

I recently watched The Winds of War on DVD and, despite some glaring flaws that I’ll get to later, it holds up well as both a history of World War II and a tribute to those who battled Hitler’s evil. Like Wouk’s novels, the miniseries does a good job of breaking down not only how Hitler came to power but also why the rest of the world was often in denial about what was happening. Watching the entire miniseries in one setting can be overwhelming. It’s a big production and it is also unmistakably a product of a time when the major networks didn’t have to worry about competition from cable. It takes its time but, in the end, you’re glad that it did. All of the little details can get exhausting but they’re important to understanding just how Hitler was able to catch the world off-guard.

Jan-Michael Vincent and Ali MacGraw in The Winds of War

The miniseries does suffer due to the miscasting of some key roles. Both Jan-Michael Vincent and Ali MacGraw were far too old for their roles. Vincent was 38 and MacGraw was 44 when they were cast as naive and idealistic lovers trying to find themselves in Europe. It’s perhaps less of a problem for Vincent, who had yet to lose his looks to alcoholism and who looked enough like Robert Mitchum that he could pass as Mitchum’s son. But MacGraw is simply terrible in her role, flatly delivering her lines and looking more like Vincent’s mother than his lover. It’s particularly jarring when she mockingly calls diplomat Leslie Sloat “Old Sloat,” because Sloat was played by David Dukes, who was six years younger than MacGraw.

67 year-old Robert Mitchum was also much too old to play an ambitious junior officer, one whose main goal in life is still to ultimately become an admiral. When he ends up having an affair with a younger British journalist played by 30ish Victoria Tennant, the difference in their ages is even more pronounced than in Wouk’s novel. (Pug was in his 40s in The Winds of War.) However, Mitchum overcomes his miscasting by virtue of his natural gravitas. With his weary presence and authoritative voice, Mitchum simply is Pug.

A ratings hit and a multiple Emmy nominee, The Winds of War was followed up five years later by War and Remembrance. Like its predecessor, War and Remembrance set records. The script ran 1,492 pages and featured 356 speaking parts. The production employed 44,000 extras and filming took nearly two years, from January of 1986 to September of 1987. With a budget of $104 million, it was the most expensive television production to date. The final miniseries had a 30-hour running time, which was divided over 12 nights. War and Remembrance not only made history because of its cost and length but also as the first major production to be allowed to film on location at the Auschwitz concentration camp. For many members of the generation born after the end of World War II, War and Remembrance would serve as their first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Director Dan Curtis returned and with him came Robert Mitchum, now in his 70s and still playing a junior naval officer. David Dukes once again played the hapless diplomat, Leslie Sloat. Ralph Bellamy also returned as FDR as did Victoria Tennant as Mitchum’s lover, Polly Bergen as Mitchum’s wife, and Peter Graves as Bergen’s lover. However, they were the exception. The majority of the original cast was replaced for the sequel, in most cases for the better. With John Houseman too ill to reprise his role, John Gielgud took over the role of Aaron Jastrow while Hart Bochner replaced the famously troubled Jan-Michael Vincent. Robert Hardy took over the role of Churchill while Hitler was recast with Steven Berkoff. Best of all, Jane Seymour replaced Ali MacGraw in the role of Natalie and gave the best performance of her career. Other characters were played by a mix of up-and-comers to tv veterans, with the cast eventually including everyone from Barry Bostwick and Sharon Stone to E.G. Marshall and Ian McShane.

Jane Seymour and John Gielgud

With a stronger cast and (ironically, considering the running length) a more focused storyline, War and Remembrance is superior to The Winds of War in every way. That doesn’t mean that it’s perfect, of course. The scenes featuring Barry Bostwick as a submarine commander feel as if they go on forever and Robert Mitchum still seems like he should be preparing for retirement instead of angling for a promotion. But none of that matters when the miniseries focuses on Aaron and Natalie Jastrow and their struggle to survive life in the Theresienstadt Ghetto and eventually Auschwitz. At the time that War and Remembrance was initially broadcast, the concentration camp scenes were considered to be highly controversial and many viewers complained that they were so disturbing that they should not have been aired during prime time. (This was four years before Schindler’s List.) Seen today, those scenes are the most important part of the film. Not only do they show why the war had to be fought but they also demand that the world never allow such a thing to happen again.

Though it was considered by a rating disappointment when compared to its predecessor, War and Remembrance was still a multiple-Emmy nominee. Controversially, it defeated Lonesome Dove for Best Miniseries. Both Winds of War and War and Remembrance have been released on DVD and, like the books that inspired them, they both hold up well. They pay tribute to not only those who fought the Nazis but also to the humanistic vision of Herman Wouk.

Herman Wouk (1915-2019)

Cleaning Out The DVR #5: Around The World In 80 Days (dir by Michael Anderson)

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, as a part of my effort to clean out my DVR by watching and reviewing 38 movies in 10 days, I watched the 1956 Best Picture winner, Around The World In 80 Days.

Based on a novel by Jules Verne, Around The World In 80 Days announces, from the start, that it’s going to be a spectacle. Before it even begins telling its story, it gives us a lengthy prologue in which Edward R. Murrow discusses the importance of the movies and Jules Verne. He also shows and narrates footage from Georges Méliès’s A Trip To The Moon. Seen today, the most interesting thing about the prologue (outside of A Trip To The Moon) is the fact that Edward R. Murrow comes across as being such a pompous windbag. Take that, Goodnight and Good Luck.

Once we finally get done with Murrow assuring us that we’re about to see something incredibly important, we get down to the actual film. In 1872, an English gentleman named Phileas Fogg (played by David Niven) goes to London’s Reform Club and announces that he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. Four other members of the club bet him 20,000 pounds that he cannot. Fogg takes them up on their wager and soon, he and his valet, Passepartout (Cantinflas) are racing across the world.

Around The World in 80 Days is basically a travelogue, following Fogg and Passepartout as they stop in various countries and have various Technicolor adventures. If you’re looking for a serious examination of different cultures, this is not the film to watch. Despite the pompousness of Murrow’s introduction, this is a pure adventure film and not meant to be taken as much more than pure entertainment. When Fogg and Passepartout land in Spain, it means flamenco dancing and bullfighting. When they travel to the U.S., it means cowboys and Indians. When they stop off in India, it means that they have to rescue Princess Aouda (Shirley MacClaine!!!) from being sacrificed. Aouda ends up joining them for the rest of their journey.

Also following them is Insepctor Fix (Robert Newton), who is convinced that Fogg is a bank robber. Fix follows them across the world, just waiting for his chance to arrest Fogg and disrupt his race across the globe.

But it’s not just Inspector Fix who is on the look out for the world travelers. Around The World In 80 Days is full of cameos, with every valet, sailor, policeman, and innocent bystander played by a celebrity. (If the movie were made today, Kim Kardashian and Chelsea Handler would show up at the bullfight.) I watch a lot of old movies so I recognized some of the star cameos. For instance, it was impossible not to notice Marlene Dietrich hanging out in the old west saloon, Frank Sinatra playing piano or Peter Lorre wandering around the cruise ship. But I have to admit that I missed quite a few of the cameos, much as how a viewer 60 years in the future probably wouldn’t recognize Kim K or Chelsea Handler in our hypothetical 2016 remake. However, I could tell whenever someone famous showed up on screen because the camera would often linger on them and the celeb would often look straight at the audience with a “It’s me!” look on their face.

Around The World in 80 Days is usually dismissed as one of the lesser best picture winners and it’s true that it is an extremely long movie, one which doesn’t necessarily add up to much beyond David Niven, Cantinflas, and the celeb cameos. But, while it may not be Oscar worthy, it is a likable movie. David Niven is always fun to watch and he and Cantinflas have a nice rapport. Shirley MacClaine is not exactly believable as an Indian princess but it’s still interesting to see her when she was young and just starting her film career.

Add to that, Around The World In 80 Days features Jose Greco in this scene:

Around The World In 80 Days may not rank with the greatest films ever made but it’s still an entertaining artifact of its time. Whenever you sit through one of today’s multi-billion dollar cinematic spectacles, remember that you’re watching one of the descendants of Around The World In 80 Days.

Lisa Reviews An Oscar Winner: Gandhi (dir by Richard Attenborough)

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I just finished watching the 1982 best picture winner Gandhi on TCM. This is going to be a tough movie to review.

Why?

Well, first off, there’s the subject matter. Gandhi is an epic biopic of Mohandas Gandhi (played, very well, by Ben Kingsley). It starts with Gandhi as a 23 year-old attorney in South Africa who, after getting tossed out of a first class train compartment because of the color of his skin, leads a non-violent protest for the rights of all Indians in South Africa. He gets arrested several times and, at one point, is threatened by Daniel Day-Lewis, making his screen debut as a young racist. However, eventually, Gandhi’s protest draws international attention and pressure. South Africa finally changes the law to give Indians a few rights.

Gandhi then returns to his native India, where he leads a similar campaign of non-violence in support of the fight for India’s independence from the British Empire. For every violent act on the part of the British, Gandhi responds with humility and nonviolence. After World War II, India gains its independence and Gandhi becomes the leader of the nation. When India threatens to collapse as a result of violence between Hindus and Muslims, Gandhi fasts and announces that he will allow himself to starve to death unless the violence ends. Gandhi brings peace to his country and is admired the world over. And then, like almost all great leaders, he’s assassinated.

Gandhi tells the story of a great leader but that doesn’t necessarily make it a great movie. In order to really examine Gandhi as a film, you have to be willing to accept that criticizing the movie is not the same as criticizing what (or who) the movie is about.

As I watched Gandhi, my main impression was that it was an extremely long movie. Reportedly, Gandhi was a passion project for director Richard Attenborough. An admirer of Gandhi’s and a lifelong equality activist, Attenborough spent over 20 years trying to raise the money to bring Gandhi’s life to the big screen. Once he finally did, it appears that Attenbrough didn’t want to leave out a single detail. Gandhi runs three and a half hours and, because certain scenes drag, it feels ever longer.

My other thought, as I watched Gandhi, was that it had to be one of the least cinematic films that I’ve ever seen. Bless Attenborough for the nobility of his intentions but there’s not a single interesting visual to be found in the entire film. I imagine that, even in 1982, Gandhi felt like a very old-fashioned movie. In the end, it feels more like something you would see on PBS than in a theater.

The film is full of familiar faces, which works in some cases and doesn’t in others. For instance, Gandhi’s British opponents are played by a virtual army of familiar character actors. Every few minutes, someone like John Gielgud, Edward Fox, Trevor Howard, John Mills, or Nigel Hawthorne will pop up and wonder why Gandhi always has to be so troublesome. The British character actors all do a pretty good job and contribute to the film without allowing their familiar faces to become a distraction.

But then, a few American actors show up. Martin Sheen plays a reporter who interview Gandhi. Candice Bergen shows up as a famous photographer. And, unlike their British equivalents, neither Sheen nor Bergen really seem to fit into the film. Both of them end up overacting. (Sheen, in particular, delivers every line as if he’s scared that we’re going to forget that we’re watching a movie about an important figure in history.) They both become distractions.

I guess the best thing that you can say about Gandhi, as a film, is that it features Ben Kingsley in the leading role. He gives a wonderfully subtle performance as Gandhi, making him human even when the film insists on portraying him as a saint. He won an Oscar for his performance in Gandhi and he deserved one.

As for Gandhi‘s award for best picture … well, let’s consider the films that it beat: E.T., Tootsie, The Verdict, and Missing. And then, consider some of the films from 1982 that weren’t even nominated: Blade Runner, Burden of Dreams, Class of 1984, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, My Favorite Year, Poltergeist, Tenebrae, Vice Squad, Fanny and Alexander…

When you look at the competition, it’s clear that the Academy’s main motive in honoring Gandhi the film was to honor Gandhi the man. In the end, Gandhi is a good example of a film that, good intentions aside, did not deserve its Oscar.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oWqlb_TlLQ