William Wallace | Through the Shattered Lens

Last year, at this time, I set a goal for myself.

I decided that, in 2017, I would review a movie a day and I nearly succeeded. I didn’t review a movie on the day Chris Cornell died. I missed a few days in March due to a sinus infection. Including the review that I’m posting below, I reviewed 356 movies in 2017. According to the year-end stats, my most popular reviews were for Heavy Metal Parking Lot, Slaughter, Body Chemistry 3, Body Chemistry 4, and Beatlemania.

Since tomorrow will be the start of a new year, this is going to be the end of my A Movie A Day experiment. In 2018, I’ll still be watching movies and posting reviews on this site but this is my final daily review. For my final Movie A Day, I picked the greatest movie of all time, The Delta Force!

Produced by Cannon Films, The Delta Force starts in 1980, with a helicopter exploding in the desert. America’s elite special missions force has been sent to Iran to rescue the men and women being held hostage in the embassy. The mission is a disaster with the members of Delta Force barely escaping with their lives. Captain Chuck Norris tells his commanding officer, Col. Lee Marvin, that he’s finished with letting cowardly politicians control their missions. Chuck heads to Montana while Lee spends the next few years hitting on the bartender at his local watering hole.

In 1985, terrorists led by Robert Forster hijack an airplane and divert it to Beirut. Among those being held hostage: Martin Balsam, Shelley Winters, Lainie Kazan, Susan Strasberg, Kim Delaney, and Bo Svenson. The great George Kennedy plays a priest named O’Malley who, when the Jewish passengers are moved to a separate location, declares himself to be Jewish and demands to be taken too. Jerry Lazarus is a hostage who spends the movie holding a Cabbage Patch doll that his daughter gave him for luck. Former rat packer Joey Bishop plays a passenger who says, “Beirut was beautiful then. Beautiful.” Fassbinder favorite Hanna Schygulla is the stewardess who refuses to help the terrorists because, “I am German!”

In America, General Robert Vaughn activates The Delta Force to rescue the hostages and take out the terrorists. As Lee Marvin prepares everyone (including Cannon favorite, Steve James and, in a nonspeaking role, Liam Neeson) to leave, the big question is whether Chuck Norris will come out of retirement for the mission. Of course, he does. Even better, he brings his motorcycle with him.

Anyone who has ever seen The Delta Force remembers Chuck’s motorcycle. Not only did it look incredibly cool but it was also mounted with machine guns and it could fire missiles at cowardly terrorists. It didn’t matter whether you agreed with the film’s politics were or whether you even liked the movie, everyone who watched The Delta Force wanted Chuck’s motorcycle. As the old saying goes, “You may be cool but you’ll never be Chuck Norris firing a missile from a motorcycle cool.”

The Delta Force is really three different films. One film, shot in the style of a disaster film, is about the hostages on the plane and their evil captors. The second film is Lee Marvin (in his final movie role) preparing his men to storm the airplane. The third movie is Chuck Norris chasing Robert Forster on his motorcycle. Put those three movies together and you have the ultimate Cannon movie. The Delta Force was even directed by Cannon’s head honcho, Menahem Golan. (Years earlier, Golan also directed Operation Thunderbolt, an Israeli film about the raid on Entebbe, which features more than a few similarities to The Delta Force. Golan received his first and only Oscar nomination when Operation Thunderbolt was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.)

The Delta Force is also the ultimate 80s movie. It opens with the Carter administration fucking everything up and it ends with the Reagan administration giving Lee Marvin and Chuck Norris the greenlight to blow up some terrorists. There is not much nuance to be found in The Delta Force but it still feels good to watch Chuck beat the bad guys. Top that off with a shameless score from Alan Silvestri and you have one of the greatest action movies of all time.

At the end of The Delta Force, as cans of Budweiser are being passed out to rescued hostages, an extra is clearly heard to shout, “Beer! America!” Then everyone sings America The Beautiful.

That says it all.

Directed by Louis Malle, William Wilson is the second part of the 1968 anthology film, Spirits of the Dead. All three of the stories were adapted from the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

William Wilson is one of Poe’s best known and most highly regarded stories. It’s also one that has been adapted into several films, perhaps most famously as the silent German film Student of Prague. So, how did Louis Malle do when it came time to direct his own version?

Malle’s William Wilson opens with the title character (played by Alain Delon) running through the cobblestone streets of a gray city. As we shall soon learn, the time is the early 19th century. William Wilson is an officer in the Austrian army, assigned to an occupied Italian village. Wilson, with blood on his head, rushes into a church, ducks into a confessional, and tells the priest that he has just murdered someone.

Wilson goes on to tell the story of not just his life but also the life of his Doppelganger, who is also named William Wilson and who is just as virtuous as the first Wilson is corrupt. All of his life, the first William Wilson has just wanted to be evil in peace and every time, the Doppelganger has shown up and ruined things. The Doppelganger first showed up when Wilson was a young boy and he’s proceeded to always pop up wherever Wilson may happen to go. When the first Wilson was enrolled in medical school and wanted to dissect a village girl, his Doppelganger had to show up and stop things. When the first Wilson beat the famous courtesan, Giuseppina (Brigitte Bardot), at cards and won the right to whip her, the Doppelganger had to show up and let everyone know that Wilson had cheated. Is the Doppelganger real or is he just a figment of Wilson’s imagination? Is Wilson just evil or is he crazy as well? Wilson isn’t sure but he does know that a well-placed dagger is one way to determine the truth…

Reportedly, Malle agreed to direct William Wilson because he was trying to raise the money to direct a far more personal film, Murmer of the Heart. As such, Malle didn’t have a personal stake in William Wilson and made several compromises to keep the film’s producer happy. As a result, William Wilson often doesn’t make much sense. For instance, how does Wilson go from being merely decadent to suddenly trying to dissect a living human being? Though the idea of Wilson cheating at cards is taken straight from Poe’s original story, Brigitte Bardot’s lengthy cameo still feels out of place.

That said, Malle was a good enough director that, even if he was detached from the end result, his segment of Spirits of the Dead is always watchable. The film’s best moments are the ones that simply study Alain Delon’s fascinating face. Delon feels miscast as the virtuous Doppelganger (who, let’s just be honest, is kind of a prig) but he is dangerously compelling at William Wilson. The coldness of his eyes tells us everything that we need to know about who William Wilson is.

William Wilson is technically better than the 1st part of Spirits of the Dead, Roger Vadim’s Metzengerstein, but it’s never as much fun.