Man Man

Another genre of films that I find myself getting jaded with is the 1960s spy movie. Well, not so much the parodies that sprang up after Doctor No made James Bond a big hit, but the "serious" spy movies that made the whole spy business seem like a cynical and meaningless game. That view was reinforced when I recently watched The Double Man.

The movie opens up with a brief establishing sequence in Berlin, which of course at the time was a divided city. Somebody leaves the American sector into the East, and there's talk between some intelligence types that results in a dossier showing the photo of Dan Slater (Yul Brynner). Cut to Austria, and a young man dies in a skiing accident that anybody watching the movie even without having seen the box guide synopsis of the plot knows fully well isn't really an accent. That man is Dan's son Robert, and news naturally gets back to Dan.

Dan works in Washington for the CIA under Edwards (Lloyd Nolan). Dan goes to the Austrian Alps in part to fetch his son's body and belongings, and in part to find out what really happened, since he has good enough reason to believe that it might not have been an accident. Presumably the Soviets knew that this was Dan's son and that Dan is a higher-up in the CIA, making him valuable for, well, reasons. Edwards and all the other CIA people have reason that this is a trap, designed to get Dan to some out of the way place where he can be captured or something; the exact nature of the trap isn't necessarily known.

Dan gets to the Tirolean ski resort of St. Anton, which in this print doesn't look quite as nice as it probably should. He begins to ask around, and goes up in the cable car that took Robert on his last ride, where he finds lovely young Gina (Britt Ekland), who was apparenty in the cable car with Robert and a couple of mysterious men on that fateful morning. But Gina won't talk to Dan. They get out at the same stop to ski the same route, and there's a third person, an older man who seems to be watching Dan.

Dan eventually talks to Gina's boss, Mrs. Carrington, which is an in to Gina, and learns that there were two men on the cable car, that older man and one wearing a ski mask so nobody can learn his identity. Further investigation reveals that all of these people are still in town, which piques Dan's curiosity. In any case, he also knows it's likely a trap, but he needs to be able to break it whatever it is. Edwards, for his part, is getting more worried and wants Dan to return home immediately if not sooner.

Sure enough, it is a trap, and the trap is that the Soviets have found a man that they can give plastic surgery to to look just like Dan. (Didn't they think about fingerprints?) They'll lure Dan to the ski resort, where they can capture him and replace him with the doppelgänger whom they'll send back to Washington. Yeah right this is going to work. Dan certainly has enough secrets that the replacement couldn't possibly figure out in such a short time.

And that's one of the big problems with The Double Man. The plot is daft, and in the end we just don't care all that much about these characters. And as I said earlier, although a good portion of the movie was filmed on location, it just doesn't look pretty at all. So I'm sorry to say that The Double Man isn't as good as it probably ought to have been.

The Journey

Another of those movies that shows up on TCM regularly enough but that for whatever reason I had never actually watched in its entirety, is The Journey. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM I recorded it so that I could later watch it and write up a review to post here.

The opening credits play out over scenes at the exterior of an airport. We then are taken to the inside of Budapest Airport early in November 1956. For those who don't know, at the end of October student protests led to a new, somewhat less Communist government in Budapets, something which the Soviets couldn't tolerate, so they sent in tanks. The authorities also closed the airport, with a whole bunch of passengers stranded.

Among them is Hugh Deverill (Robert Morley), a British television representative who represents the worst of the British stereotypes about Brits who think they can just dictate terms to everybody around them and get their way. There's also an American family, the Rhinelanders (E.G. Marshall and Anne Jackson, with a very young Ron Howard as their younger son), and various people from other countries, all wondering how they're going to get out of the country.

Into all of this walks Lady Ashmore (Deborah Kerr), accompanied by a man calling himself Flemyng (Jason Robards) who is feeling rather unwell. It's also obvious that Flemyng isn't who he seems to be. Worse is that Ashmore has met Deverill in the past back in England. And Deverill is an absolute prick about it, constantly not wanting to give Lady Ashmore any privacy. He also knows she's married, so shouldn't be traveling in dangerous Communist Hungary alone, and certainly not with a sick man who isn't her husband.

The stranded passengers get put on a bus traveling to Vienna, since it's the closest airport in a non-Communist country, and get stopped at a couple of roadblocks, with Flemyng fainting at one of them and it being revealed that he's traveling under a false identity. They then get to the last major town before the border with Austria. There, the passengers are forced to stop, and wait at the hotel that has been commandeered for just this purpose.

At the hotel is a Soviet Red Army officer, Major Surov (Yul Brynner). He suspects something is up, and demands everyone surrender their passports so that he can interview them individually before letting them go through. This is going to be a particular problem for Flemyng, since he's not actually Flemyng but a Hungarian freedom fighter named Kedes. Not only that, but his physical situation is getting worse to the point that it's fairly obvious to everyone, even Surov, that something is badly wrong.

Further complicating matters is that Surov finds himself taken with Ashmore, or at least acting like he is. You could get the impression that Surov is going to ask for sexual favors in exchange for letting Kedes go, or something similar. But then, this is a movie from the late 1950s released by MGM, so most likely something like that isn't going to show up in a film subject to the Production Code.

Still, The Journey isn't a bad movie, although it's one that's not without its flaws. It runs a bit over two hours, which is a bit too long. It also feels a bit too pat, with the ending being somewhat unrealistic. Then again, I think it's less about the plot and more about the characters and their dealings with each other, with the various stars giving capable performances. The Journey is not, I think, the best movie for anybody involved with it, but is also something not to be ashamed of.

The Magnificent Seven

We're halfway through August and up to the day honoring actor Charles Bronson. Surprisingly enough, I'd never actually sat down before and watched The Magnificent Seven end-to-end in one sitting, and certainly never done a post on it before, although I have posted about the Japanese movie of which it is a remake, Seven Samurai. So the last time The Magnificent Seven showed up on TCM, I recorded it in order to be able to do a post in conjunction with a future airing. That airing is tomorrow, August 16, at 12:45 PM.

I assume most people know the basic story, and that a lot of readers here have even seen the movie already. The action is moved from medieval Japan to 19th century Mexico, where a village in the middle of nowhere is being predated upon by bandit leader Calvera (Eli Wallach) and his substantial band of bandits. In this most recent raid, one of the villagers gets shot dead, which is the breaking point. They want to fight back, but they don't even have effective weapons. So they head north to the American border since guns are easier to get in the US, trading some of their few possessions for those guns.

When they get to the border town, they find a stalemate where the locals don't want to bury an Indian in their cemetery, so a couple of gunslingers drive the hearse past them, shooting those who actively resist. Those gunmen are Chris (Yul Brynner) and Vin (Steve McQueen). On hearing from the Mexicans, Chris realizes that the villagers would still be ill-equipped to defend themselves even if they had guns. That, combined with a sense of adventure, leads him to tell the villagers that he'll form a band of American gunslingers who will help the villagers defend themselves, even if the pay won't be good.

Over the next half-hour of the movie or so, we get set pieces introducing the rest of them Chris hires. Harry (Brad Dexter) assumes that Chris is only taking the job because there must be a gold or silver mine near the village, so he wants in; O'Reilly (Charles Bronson) needs the money, as does gambler Lee (Robert Vaughn). There's a knife expert, Britt (James Coburn) as well. Finally, there's the young hothead Chico (Horst Buchholz) who wants to be part of the group, only to not reach Chris' standards. But he's so determined, following the other six through Mexico, that eventually Chris does let him join.

When they reach the village they start to teach the villagers how to fight, even without guns, and prepare for Calvera's eventual return. Along the way, some of them start developing emotional bonds to the villagers, notably O'Reilly, who had a Mexican mother and Irish father. It's all leading up to the return of Calvera and his men for the final showdown.

The Magnificent Seven is a highly entertaining film, and it's easy to see why over the years it has gained a reputation as one of the iconic westerns. It's definitely worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

William Shatner, monk

It's easy to forget that William Shatner was a classically trained actor before becoming Captain Kirk on Star Trek more or less turned his acting career into a bit of a parody, albeit a very successful one. So, a role that looking back seems terribly out of place is one of his earliest film roles, in the 1958 adaptation of the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel The Brothers Karamazov.

As you can guess from the title, there are multiple brothers, and that the action is set in Tsarist Russia. Yul Brynner is the star, playing Dmitri Karamazov, an officer in the army who is constantly getting himself into debt because of his high-living ways. Ivan (Richard Basehart) is a writer and a radical, while Alexei (that's William Shatner) is a young monk and in many ways the conscience of the family. Their mother -- well mothers, since they're the product of two marriages in the original book -- has died, but Dad Fyodor (Lee J. Cobb) is still alive, and a towering presence over the rest of the family.

Dad has a reasonable sum of money that could be a nice nest egg inheritance for three sons, and there may be a fourth son as well. Epileptic Smerdyakov (Albert Salmi) is rumored to be Fyodor's son, fathered out of wedlock, and now he's working as a servant to Fyodor and whom Fyodor treats very badly. Although, to be fair, Fyodor treats everybody badly, with the possible exception of his mistress Grushenka (Maria Schell). Dmitri, constantly being in debt, would like to be able to get that inheritance now, although in 1870s Russia I don't think they had those dishonest companies that would buy annuities for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, Dmitri has a mistress of his own in Katya (Claire Bloom) but starts to get interested in Grushenka, although that may only be for her money.

There are threats to kill Fyodor, and as you can surmise, Fyodor does ultimately wind up murdered. Alexei the monk clearly wouldn't do such a thing, while Ivan has the airtight alibi of having been in Moscow. Dmitri is the obvious candidate and gets put on trial for it, but we learn that Smerdyakov is smarter than he seems and has been plotting to have a confrontation between Dmitri and Fyodor. With that in mind, Dmitri proclaims his innocence at trial, and has Alexei as a character reference, even though there's a ton of circumstantial evidence that makes Dmitri appear guilty.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's original novel runs to something like 800 pages, depending of course on the size of the page. Suffice it to say that it's a pretty darn long novel. It's also as much a character and philosophical study as it is a narrative novel. Both of these things mean that it's the sort of book that can be tough to adapt to a more visual and narrative-driven medium like film. (Tolstoy is even more difficult in that regard.) Here, the 800 pages are distilled down to a bit shy of two and a half hours, but even this feels long because the characterizations don't allow for quick action.

As for the acting, Yul Brynner and Lee J. Cobb both get the opportunity to give outsized performances. Brynner, despite having been born in Vladivostok and being authentically Russian, feels like a caricature of Tsarist officer stereotypes. Cobb, as always, chews the scenery wildly. William Shatner is a decided supporting role, and he does the best he can with the material. If he hadn't gone on to Captain Kirk, I think his performance would be better regarded.

The Brothers Karamazov definitely has flaws because of the difficulties in translating the source material to the screen. But it's still interesting to see how the studio tried to pull it off.

Solomon and Sheba

One of those movies that has a bit of a reputation because of the backstory is Solomon and Sheba, the reason being that actor Tyrone Power suffered a fatal heart attack on the set of the movie. Filming went ahead without him, but before now I'd never actually seen the finished product. When I noticed that it was on Tubi, I decided to watch and see what the final result actually was.

Tyrone Power was cast to play biblical King Solomon, and had actually done quite a fair bit of the movie at the time of his death, so he was replaced by Yul Brynner and all of his close-up scenes reshot. Solomon, for those who don't know this portion of the Bible that well, was the son of King David (Finlay Currie) who, at the time the movie opens, is elderly and has two sons. Solomon is the younger which means that he probably shouldn't inherit the throne, that normally going to the eldest son Adonijah (George Sanders). But David is a wise man and realizes that Adonijah would be a disaster which is why he makes it an explicit point to name Solomon the heritor after Adonijah, thinking David has already died, tries to have himself crowned king.

Solomon does a pretty good job with Israel, making it prosperous even though surrounded by enemies that aren't as well to do, something that mirrors the situation today. This makes the Egyptian pharaoh (David Farrar) angry, and he gets all of his allies together to come up with a plan for what to do with Israel. Among those allies is the monarchy of Sheba, led by a queen (Gina Lollobrigida). She's got a brilliant idea, which is that she will use her sex appeal to make Solomon fall in love with her. Israel, you see, is different from all the other countries surrounding it in that it's the only one that's monotheistic and doesn't really do depictions of its one god. Once the Queen of Sheba gets Solomon in her clutches, she'll try to introduce elements of polytheism which will bring God's wrath upon the Israelites.

It's not so much polytheism that brings all sorts of horrors upon the kingdom of Israel so much as it is Solomon's hubris. He's been a good king for the most part, but he's beginning to get a bit full of himself and thinks he's bigger than he is. And he's still got Adonijah close by, as the commander of the army no less, just waiting for the right moment to happen when he can turn on Solomon.

Solomon has by this time already built the first Temple in Jerusalem, but God's wrath leads to the destruction of the temple as well as all sorts of Biblical disasters like famine and drought upon the kingdom. Adonijah sees that this is a good time to get Egypt to attack, and Adonijah will become ruler of a vassal state. Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, as the saying goes. Of course, according to the Bible, Adonijah is not ultimately successful. But if you don't know the complete Biblical story, you'll have to see the movie to see just how Adonijah fails.

Filming for Solomon and Sheba began in 1958, at a time when Biblical epics were all the rage in both Hollywood and Europe, which makes this story one that you can see why someone would want to make a big production out of. And there's some good stuff here, mostly in the cinematography. Unfortunately, as we all know, Tyrone Power died, which necessitated not just all those reshoots, but apparently rewrites for Yul Brynner as well. Whether the script doctoring or the general atmosphere of having to complete a troubled production is what brings the movie down, I'm not certain. But there really is something here that doesn't feel quite right.

Having said that, I really think that even moreso than with other pictures I don't like, Solomon and Sheba is one where you need to watch it for yourself and draw your own conclusions as to what went wrong.

More Mongkut

About a year ago, I blogged about Anna and the King of Siam when it was running in the FXM rotation. Some years later, of course, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote a musical version, called The King and I. That one's been in the FXM rotation recently, and it's going to be on TCM this evening at 10:15 PM as part of 31 Days of Oscar.

Since the plots of the two movies aren't that different, this post is going to be a bit brief on plot and focus more on other things, like what's different in the musical from the older movie. Deborah Kerr plays Anna Leonowens, an English widow with a son who has been hired by Mongkut (Yul Brynner), King of Siam, to tutor his many children. Mongkut wants to modernize the country, but that brings all sorts of political challenges with it, as well as the repeated clashes between His Majesty and the headstrong Anna on how to achieve Mongkut's desires.

There's also a subplot involving Tuptim (Rita Moreno), who has been given by a Burmese prince to Mongkut, presumably as a concubine or a slave. Tuptim, however, already has a boyfriend in Lun Tha (Carlos Rivas), and has no desire to be pawned off to the King to be one of his zillion lovers. Interestingly, the movie handles the resolution of this subplot in a rather more muted way than in the earlier movie, in what is basically an aside saying both of the lovers have been found dead.

Part of that is because The King and I has to make room for the various musical numbers. Quite a few of the songs have become well known, including "I Whistle a Happy Tune" and "Shall We Dance", but probably the most famous of the songs is "Getting to Know You". Rodgers (the composer of the two) was quite adept at writing catchy tunes.

However, Tuptim does get a big production number of her own. As you may recall from Anna and the King of Siam, one of the big parts of the movie involves King Mongkut's holding a giant state dinner for all the Brits in Bangkok, where he can show everybody how modern and western the palace is. In The King and I, that involves Tuptim having written a play for the entertainment of the westerners, a one-act version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even if Tuptim didn't break the fourth wall (at least the one in the palace theater, not the one in the actual movie), the symbolism of her not wanting to be a slave to Mongkut would have been obvious, and Mongkut would have understood it.

The strength of The King and I is in the production numbers, as well as the performances of Kerr (Oscar nominated), and Brynner (Oscar winner). There are the same issues I mentioned in my review of Anna and the King of Siam, namely that Hollywood didn't have anywhere near enough people of Southeast Asian descent to look like the Siamese. Some people might also have an issue with the Uncle Tom's Cabin scene, although the play is clearly stylized like kabuki, and to be fair, the royal palace wouldn't have had anybody of African descent in it to play black American slaves, or any whites to play Simon Legree for that matter. The movie also has a fairly abrupt ending.

But then, people don't watch The King and I for the subtleties of the plot; instead it's for the songs, and of course those shine if you're a fan of musicals. People who do like musicals are going to love The King and I if they haven't already seen it.

The Brooklyn Cossack

Another of the movies I watched off my DVR recently is the 1962 version of the Nikolai Gogol novel Taras Bulba.

Yul Brynner plays Taras Bulba, leader of a band of Cossacks in the late 16th century. The part of the world inhabited by the Cossacks is stuck between three powerful nations: the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Poland. The various Coascak bands fight a lot; at the same time, there's also fighting with the Ottomans going on. In this case, it's a battle between Poland and the Ottomans, and the Cossack intervention on the side of the Poles saves the day. However, the Poles are duplicitous and take over the Cossack lands. Taras flees into the hills to escape the Polish yoke. (I thought this might be the Carpathians, which extend into Western Ukraine, although supposedly it's supposed to be the steppes even those are relatively flat.)

Taras and his wife have two children. They grow up to be the adults Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Ostap (Perry Lopez). Taras wants them to get a good education, so he sends them off to university in Kyiv, which is accepting Cossack students but is under Polish governance. The Poles don't particularly like the Cossacks, and treat Andrei and Ostap like dirt, subjecting them to disciplinary floggings and the like.

Worse for the brothers is that Andrei sees the lovely young woman Natalia (Christine Kaufmann). In and of itself, that wouldn't be such a big deal. But Natalia is a Polish princess. There's both class and nationality issues regarding any sort of relationship between her and a Cossack like Andrei, and if the the relationship became public, it would mean big trouble for Andrei. Unsurprisingly, the authorities do find out, and Andrei and Ostap have to beat a hasty retreat out of Kyiv and back to the old family home.

Dad is glad to see them, but in the mean time, the Cossacks have become relatively peaceful; indeed, we get to see them have a couple of celebrations. But the possibility of more fighting comes with the Poles asking the Cossacks to help them subdue the Baltics in exchange for the spoils of war. The Cossacks do go off and fight, but Taras has a trick up his sleeve. He's planning to turn on the Poles and take back the land the Poles stole from them all those years ago.

At the battle of Dubno, Taras puts his plan in motion, and is able to force the Poles to retreat inside the city walls where Taras can besiege them into surrendering. The fact that there's also a plague going through Dubno should only help the Cossacks, even though some of the people under Taras are not pleased with having to keep up a siege instead of fighting. And then it turns out that Natalia is in the city....

I have not actually read Gogol's original novel so I can only trust other reviewers who comment on how faithfully the movie follows the source material. In that light, I obviously can't make any complaints about the movie going off in its own direction. As a period action movie, it's not bad, although it certainly does have some problems. One is that it's too long, at just over two hours, and another is the casting of Curtis and Lopez as the two sons; both of them stick out like sore thumbs.

Yul Brynner, on the other hand, was born to play material like this, and does a fine job. There's also nice scenery. As I was watching, I was wondering whether this was another of those international co-productions that got made someplace like Yugoslavia which at the time was the most open of the Communist countries. When I looked it up, I discovered that filming was actually in Argentina. I guess the Pampas could easily substitute for the steppes.

All in all, Taras Bulba is not a bad movie to watch on a rainy day if you want action and something that's not overly demanding.

Catlow

Another recent watch off my DVR was the late western Catlow.

Richard Crenna plays Cowan, a marshal who served in the Civil War, but is now out west chasing Catlow (Yul Brynner). They had served together in the war, but after the war Catlow turned to a life of crime and is now rustling cattle. However, before Cowan can arrest Catlow, two groups show up. One are the Apache, who hit Cowan in the leg with an arrow; the other is led by Miller (Leonard Nimoy). Miller is a hired gunman, this time having been hired by the man whose cattle Catlow has been stealing. Miller's arrival also means that Catlow is going to be brought back to justice, although he shows his friendship to Cowan by helping remove the arrow from Cowan.

Catlow isn't about to be brought to justice, of course, and on the coach back to federal justice, he has it ambushed so that he and his men get away. He then heads for Mexico, where he's heard about a shipment of gold that had belonged to the Confederacy, but which the US wants back. That, and Catlow's girlfriend Rosita (Daliah Lavi) is down there waiting for him. Unsurprisingly, Cowan and Miller follow Catlow to Mexico, and Catlow and Miller get involved in a fight.

Eventually, Catlow leads his band of outlaws across the desert, having to deal with a lack of water, Cowan still following him despite not having jurisdiction, the Mexican military, and the Indians. There might also be traitors in his midst....

Catlow was one of those westerns that wasn't quite my cup of tea, although will probably appeal more to those who are bigger fans of the genre. I found it a bit muddled and meandering, with the characters needing a little more fleshing out. That, and the direction being uninspired, looking like any other western from the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Catlow is available on DVD as part of a three-movie set of adaptations of Louis L'Amour westerns, so you can watch and judge for yourself.

The sound of the furries wouldn't have been as bad

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to be watching the 1959 Fox version of The Sound and the Fury since it's going to be on FXM Retro tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM, and it doesn't seem to be in print on DVD. Let's just say I'll be freeing up some space on my DVR soon.

The movie starts off with jarring jazz music over the opening credits, before switching from the proper Cinemascope aspect ration to being panned-and-scanned to 16:9 in the print FXM ran, but that was the least of the problems. Ethel Waters plays the maid in some run-down Southern mansion, worried that the daughter of the family is going to be coming home. Sure enough, we cut to a shot of Quentin Compson (Joanne Woodward), on a bus pulling into their small hometown in Mississippi.

Everybody in the house is one of her uncles: alcoholic Howard (John Beal), dimwit mute Ben (Jack Warden), and responsible step-uncle Jason (Yul Brynner, sporting a ridiculous wig). Well, there's also the grandma (Françoise Rosay), but neither of Quentin's parents are around. Mom sends Quentin money from somewhere, but the letters go to Jason and Quentin thinks Jason is stealing from her. Jason, for his part, works at the local store that the Compson family used to own in a previous generation before they wound up as this dissolute mess.

Quentin, for example, is a willful young woman who's skipping school (yes, you've got 30-year-old Woodward playing about 16 here). And then when the traveling carnival comes to town, Quention sees carny Charlie (Stewart Whitman) fixing a ride with his shirt off, and she's immediately attracted to Charlie. Charlie insists he's not right for Quentin, and Jason is trying to stop the relationship too, but stupid Quentin doesn't care. She wants what she wants, and dammit if it screws up everybody else's lives even more than they're already screwed up.

And then Quentin's mom Caddy (Margaret Leighton) returns home. What she wants out of the return, who knows? And who cares? By the time Caddy shows up the movie has already descended into the swamp of "let's turn the family nuttiness up to 11 just because". All of these characters are deeply screwed up, and acting at cross purposes.

As you can tell, I didn't care one bit for The Sound and the Fury. It's based on the novel by William Faulkner, although from the reviews of the movie I've read it's a fairly loose adaptation. I'm not a fan of Faulkner, having had to read As I Lay Dying in high school English, and have never had any plans to read Faulkner's book The Sound and the Fury, so I can't judge the movie on its fidelity or lack thereof to the book. All I can say is that as a movie, it doesn't stand on its own. It's a cheap, tawdry mess that could be forgiven if it had been conceived as a parody of either the Southern Gothic of a Faulkner or (even better) Tennessee Williams; or if it were a parody moved south of Douglas Sirk. But the movie seems to be taking itself seriously.

And then there's the casting. Woodward at least was a southerner, although she's much too old for the part; it's even worse than Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding, another movie that made me feel bad for Ethel Waters for having to put up with this crap. Yul Brynner is thoroughly out of place, in no way southern and burdened by that terrible wig. Why does he stay with these whack-jobs he clearly dislikes. Jack Warden as a mute doesn't have a line of dialog, so who knows his motivations? I suppose you can understand why Beal's Howard Compson would drink himself to get out of this family and this movie.

Of course, I always suggest that you're free to judge for yourself when it comes to a movie that I deeply dislike. So watch tomorrow if you have FXM. Because it's not on DVD, and even if it were, I wouldn't be spending my money on it.

Cross cross cross

Another recent movie viewing for me that's available from the Warner Archive is Triple Cross.

The movie starts off with a bang, quite literally, as an explosion goes off opening up a safe somehwere in fashionable London of the 1930s. Rifling through the safe and walking off with the valuable jewels is Eddie Chapman, played by Christopher Plummer. As you can tell by the link, Eddie Chapman was a real person, leading what was known as the "Jelly Gang" or "Gelignite Gang", after the explosive used to crack the safes.

Anyhow, the law was about to catch up with Eddie, so he fled Britain for Jersey, in the Channel Islands because apparently the Channel Island's semi-autonomous nature made extradition to Britain more difficult. Of course, Eddie kept committing crimes, and would eventually be caught and jailed on Jersey.

If you noticed the date at the beginning, you should know that the late 1930s means World War II was on the horizon. And if you remember your history, you'll recall that the Germans occupied the Channel Islands starting in June 1940. So Chapman eventually ended up in a prison in France. With all those criminal skills and a possible 14-year sentence awaiting him back in Britain, he presented himself as a model candidate to spy against Britain for the Nazis, with his handlers in the movie taking the form of a Baron (Yul Brynner), a Countess (Romy Schneider), and a Nazi colonel (Gert Fröbe). They eventually decided that Chapman was loyal enough that they could send him on a sabotage mission to Britain.

Of course, Chapman was only loyal to himself. Once in Britain, Chapman started meeting with the British, in the form of a "Distinguished Civilian" (I believe his name is never given), played by Trevor Howard. Now, the British think Chapman is dead because of course the Nazis made a point of staging a phony execution. Why the British in the movie didn't fingerprint him is beyond me. Chapman is willing to work for the British, but as the cost of them pardoning him for all crimes he committed in the past.

Once the British decide that Chapman probably is loyal to them, or at least as loyal as he's ever going to be, they prepare him for a mission back in occupied France.

Eddie Chapman's story sounds like an exciting one, full of twists and turns and the backstabbing that a title like Triple Cross implies. And yet, the movie makes Chapman's story seem decidedly pedestrian. It's not that the movie is bad by any means, but it seems slow and makes it feel as though there was really surprisingly little going on with Chapman's service during the war.

The acting is uniformly competent if not great, and the cinematography is nice. But the movie feels like it could have been so much more.

Cast a Giant Shadow

I noticed that Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD, so I finally got around to watching it off my DVR to do a full-length post on it here.

Kirk Douglas plays David "Mickey" Marcus, who at the start of the movie is a lawyer living in New York and shopping in Macy's at Christmas 1947. He's actually Jewish, at least by birth; he says he hasn't been to temple since his bar mitzvah. Anyhow, he's being followed through Macy's for a reason we'll soon learn. The man following him is Major Safir (James Donald), a representative from the would-be Israeli army. Israel wasn't an independent state yet, but the United Nations had already decided that the British mandate over Palestine was going to end in May 1948 and there would be a partition of the region, giving the Jews a state of their own, even if the planned territory was tiny and not at all contiguous. However, the nascent government knows that as soon as the British mandate ends, the various Arab armies are going to attack and try to take over the whole of Palestine, pushing the Jews who knows where.

They need military help, and it turns out that Marcus was a colonel in the US Army during World War II. Plus, he wrote a bunch of training manuals, so he'd be just the right person to provide the technical support the various Israeli military factions -- who aren't particularly united themselves -- desperately need. So they'd like Marcus to come over to Israel and provide them that support. Marcus isn't so certain he wants to do it, in part because he's got a wife Emma (Angie Dickinson) in New York, but eventually he does decide to take an advisory position.

It turns out that the Israelis really do need help. They're badly underarmed, and undermanned, ultimately being forced into using whatever refugees they can smuggle in (think Exodus) to do work and if possible fight despite the fact that they've had no training. Commander Asher (Yul Brynner) does ultimately respect Marcus, although he also knows that Marcus has no real knowledge of the situation on the ground in Palestine and is almost naïve about it. The two are often at loggerheads over both tactics and strategy. But the Defense Minister standing in for David Ben-Gurion (quite a few names were changed although a fair amount of the story is as it happened; the minister renamed Zion is played by Luther Adler) consistently tries to convince Marcus to stay on. And Marcus is provided with a love interest in the form of Magda (Senta Berger).

Eventually we get to the Israeli declaration of independence, and the action picks up with the Arabs predictably declaring war against the Jews. There are a bunch of Jews in Jerusalem, but they're cut off because the Arabs own all the land around the city and control the high points overlooking the one road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Until, that is, a Bedouin leader (Topol) reminds everybody of a wadi that could be the starting point for a road around the Arab positions. Building that road, however, is going to be a big challenge. And they have to get it done before the cease fire and positions are frozen; without that the Jews can't claim any part of Jerusalem.

Cast a Giant Shadow is a well-made movie that tells an interesting story, but there's something about it that has a rather perfunctory feel about it. There's a lot that feels contrived, especially regarding the two female leads. Magda is apparently the one character who was closest to being made up from whole cloth to make a more palatable movie, while Emma is generally an afterthought. There are also a couple of weird cameos. Yul Brynner is listed at the end of the cast in the closing credits as one of those cameos although he's quite good and very necessary to the plot. The other two are John Wayne as a stand-in for General Patton (Patton was Marcus' commander, but had died before the action in the story), and Frank Sinatra as a pilot who actually winds up taking part in the battle by creating fake explosions. Couldn't they have gotten Jewish Rat Packer Sammy Davis at least? Pluses besides Brynner are Luther Adler; Kirk Douglas to a lesser extent; and the cinematography to a greater extent.

Overall, I think Cast a Giant Shadow is a movie it's certainly good to have seen once, but one that I don't think I'm going to be watching multiple times.