Tag Archives: Tony Bonner

You Can’t Win ‘Em All (1970, directed by Peter Collinson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Two Americans meet up in Turkey in 1922.  Josh Corey (Charles Bronson) is a cynical soldier-of-fortune who, along with his mercenary crew, is hoping to make money out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.  Adam Dyer (Tony Curtis) is the heir to a shipping company and is hoping to get his last remaining boat out of the Turkish dock where it’s been interned since World War I.  Osman Bey (Gregorie Aslan), one of the local powerbrokers who has risen to power since the Turkish Revolution, hires Josh and Adam to escort his daughters and their protector, Alia (Michele Mercier), to Mecca.  Actually, the plan is for them to instead go to Cairo to recover a priceless treasure.  The journey to Cairo is filled with action and betrayal as Josh and Adam try to navigate the upheaval of the post-war Middle East.

You Can’t Win ‘Em All is a mix of action and comedy, an adventure that owes more than a little to the other big budget heist films of the 60s and 70s.  (Director Peter Collinson was hired due to his work on The Italian Job.)  The film’s humor comes from the partnership of the stoic Bronson with the talkative Tony Curtis.  In fact, the film’s main flaw is that Tony Curtis talks too much.  Curtis simply will not shut up.  After about fifteen minutes, I was tired of listening to him.  Curtis’s acting limitations really come through the more that he talks and, as a result, Bronson walks away with the entire movie by saying next to nothing.  Bronson keeps largely quiet because he doesn’t have to speak to make an impression.  His stare says everything that needs to be said.

You Can’t Win ‘Em All is uneven but it has a few good action sequences and Bronson doing what Bronson did best.  Watching this movie made me appreciate Charles Bronson all the more.  Even when working with a less-than-great script and a miscast co-star, Bronson still had the undefinable quality that made him a star.

Dreaming of Linda Blair: Dead Sleep (1992, directed by Alec Mills)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Maggie Healey (Linda Blair) is an American nurse in Australia.  Freshly separated from her drug addict boyfriend, Maggie gets a job working at a mental hospital.  Dr. Jonathan Heckett (Tony Bonner) is experimenting with “dead sleep therapy,” where the patients are kept drugged at night.  Maggie notices that the patients keep dying and that Dr. Heckett doesn’t care so she teams up with an annoying activist to investigate what dead sleep therapy is actually about.

This was on TCM at 3 a.m. last night, airing right after Dreamscape.  Dead Sleep might be disguised as a horror film but there’s nothing scary about it.  When the patients are in dead sleep, they don’t even have nightmares, which is a huge missed opportunity.  The movie is so sloppily put together that it doesn’t even reveal why Dr. Heckett is putting his patients in dead sleep, other than he’s just evil.  Linda Blair delivers her lines as if she is reading them off a cue card and the entire movie look like it was filmed at a community college.  The only amusing thing about the movie was that all of the male patients got to wear hospital gowns when they went under deep sleep while all the female patients slept topless.  Normally I wouldn’t complain but it was so blatant what the filmmakers were doing that it was hard not to laugh when the movie tried to pivot to being a serious drama.  A film starring Linda Blair has no right to be this boring.

A Movie A Day #14: Eyewitness (1970, directed by John Hough)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

eyewitness-1970-film

In Eyewitness (which is also known as Sudden Terror), eleven year-old Ziggy (Mark Lester) witnesses a policeman (Peter Vaughan) assassinating a visiting African dignitary but, because he has a history of “crying wolf,” he can’t get anyone to believe him.  Not his older sister, Pippa (Susan George).  Not his grandfather (Lionel Jeffries), the lighthouse keeper.  Not the housekeeper, Madame Robiac (Betty Marsden).  Not even Tom Jones (Tony Bonner), a tourist who fancies Pippa.  When he sees two policemen driving up to his grandfather’s lighthouse, Ziggy panics and runs.  Though John Hough’s direction, which is full of zoom shots and Dutch angles, is dated, Eyewitness holds up well as a tight thriller.  Susan George was beautiful in 1970 and Peter Vaughan is a great villain.

If Sam Peckinpah had ever made a children’s movie, it would probably look a lot like Eyewitness.  The movie starts out with Ziggy playing on the beach and pretending to be a soldier while imaginary gunshots and explosions are heard in the background.  It ends with a strange joke about a man who looks like Hitler, followed by a cheery freeze frame.  In between all that cheeriness, the assassin and his brother (Peter Bowles) chase Ziggy across Malta and kill anyone who gets in their way, from a friendly priest to a ten year-old girl being held by her father.  I counted ten onscreen death, which is a lot considering that this British movie was released at a time when some were still arguing that Jon Pertwee-era Dr. Who was too scary for children.  There’s even an exciting car chase that ends with one car overturned and the blood-covered survivors struggling to drag themselves out from underneath the wreckage.  How many British children were traumatized by Eyewitness?