Our Man Flint (1966)

The enormous success of the first James Bond movies launched an avalanche of copies, clones, rip-offs and spoofs. Among the more successful of the American efforts in this regard were the two Derek Flint movies. The first of these was Our Man Flint, released in 1966.

What I find really surprising about this movie is just how hostile most of the online reviews are. Perhaps it just shows how humourless our world has become. But when I find reviewers comparing it unfavourably to the horrendously laboured Austin Powers movies I really start to fear for the future of our civilisation. Our Man Flint has an easy-going charm and an effortless quality that Austin Powers sadly lacks.

The weak point to Our Man Flint is the premise. Mad scientists aiming at world domination by controlling the weather was a cliché even in 1966. The movie does add an amusing and original twist even here though - these are mad scientists who are also into the whole peace and love vibe. They want world domination so everyone can be happy. They’re diabolical criminal mastermind hippies who promise a world of free love and go-go dancing.

Derek Flint (James Coburn) is a former intelligence agent who has quit the spy game to devote himself to pleasure. He lives a life of luxury in a love nest made for five. Even James Bond never managed four girlfriends at once. Now his former boss, Cramden (Lee J. Cobb), has to try to lure him back for another assignment for ZOWIE (Zonal Organisation for World Intelligence and Espionage). Flint turns him down but changes his mind when someone tries to kill him. Flint is being hunted by a glamorous female agent employed by the mad scientists. Her job is to kill him but she’s too overcome by his manly charms to actually want him dead.

The plot isn’t really the point of the movie. It’s all about the style and the wit, and it has plenty of that. I suspect that a lot of the people who’ve reviewed this movie unfavourably have taken it too seriously. The island headquarters of the bad guys includes a pleasure zone populated by women programmed as love slaves. How anyone could fail to realise that this is not male wish fulfillment, it’s a joke, is beyond me.

Flint is not just a secret agent. He’s a polymath, an art connoisseur, a gourmet, an authority on every conceivable subject and of course he’s irresistible to women. The bad guys really don’t have a chance, but then this is a spoof, and it’s the invulnerable infallible hero that it’s spoofing. James Coburn gets the tone just right and avoids the obvious danger of becoming annoying by being so perfect. He’s so obviously not taking any of this seriously, and he doesn’t overplay it.

Lee J. Cobb is an odd choice for what is essentially a lighthearted comic role but he manages reasonably well.

The sets are a major plus. They’re not just the usual secret laboratory/secret criminal headquarters sets - the mad scientists’ island is like a combination of secret laboratory and discotheque. There’s even a mock drive-in theatre in the pleasure zone where couples can experience the ultimate in sensual delights - necking at the drive-in.

While this is strictly a fun romp it’s also an amusing satire of well-meaning but deluded idealists who want to make the world perfect, as long as it’s their idea of perfection. That’s about as close as this film ever gets to anything even remotely approaching a serious message.

The DVD presentation is adequate. It’s available in a two-movie set along with the second Flint movie, In Like Flint. The transfer is good and it’s in the correct ’scope aspect ratio but there are no extras apart from a trailer.

This movie has submarines, silly gadgets, explosions, a secret headquarters inside a volcano, trained attack eagles and go-go dancing. What’s not to like?

De Sade (1969)

That De Sade fails is not at all surprising. What is surprising is that it’s a more interesting failure than you might expect.

This 1969 production was a very ambitious undertaking for American International Pictures, with a prestige cast and elaborate sets and costumes. It’s also artistically ambitious.

It suffers from having been an AIP production and having been made in 1969. Much as I love AIP’s movies in general a biopic on the Marquis de Sade was an impossible project for them. It was too self-consciously arty for the drive-in crowd (AIP’s main audience) but at the same time not quite arty enough for the art-house crowd. And in 1969 it was always going to prove impossible to resist the temptation to get all psychedelic with the Divine Marquis. He comes across as being a misunderstood hippie. He just wanted people to be free, man. And to live authentically. But the establishment kept hassling him.

Writer Richard Matheson intended the entire movie to be a kind of dream reminiscence by de Sade on his deathbed but while director Cy Endfield more or less sticks to this plan his approach is a little too linear and too conventional to really capture that dream quality that Matheson was after. The play-within-a-play aspect works reasonably well but might have been more effective had it been pushed a bit further.

Keir Dullea was a bold casting choice as de Sade. It doesn’t quite come off. He’s too young, doesn’t look dissipated enough and doesn’t have the necessary edge. On the other hand it’s an interesting performance, and in some ways I like the fact that he plays de Sade as an ineffectual and really rather harmless and silly intellectual. After all, whatever crimes he may have imagined in his writings the Marquis was in real life mostly harmless. This was a man who was sacked as a judge by the Revolutionary government because he couldn’t bring himself to impose the death sentence.

I also rather like the chaotic feel to the much-criticised orgy sequences. This was after all what the Enlightenment led to - a mindless orgy of violence and chaos that set Europe on the path to Buchenwald and to the gulags and eventually to the greatest horror of all, postmodernism. If you want to understand the failure of western civilisation then reading de Sade is a good start. He was the first of a series of European intellectuals who devoted their lives to trashing their own civilisation, paving the way for Freud, Marx, Foucault and the postmodern rabble in general. Don’t get me wrong, I think that in his own way de Sade is an important writer - he’s important because he represents the dark side to the Enlightenment.

The acting is generally of a very high order. Lilli Palmer is terrific as de Sade’s mother-in-law from Hell. She’s so civilised and yet so monstrous, but then dealing with a son-in-law like de Sade would have been no picnic. Anna Massey is superb as his unfortunate wife while Senta Berger is solid as her sister, the woman de Sade actually loved and wanted to marry. The film could be accused of turning the Marquis’ life into a love story. The film certainly wants us to believe that de Sade’s excesses were at least partly a result of thwarted love.

And then there’s John Huston, gleefuly stealing the picture as de Sade’s wicked lecherous uncle who sets his nephew on the road to depravity.

The philosophical implications of de Sade’s work don’t get a lot of attention in the film and when it does try to tackle such issues it does so in a way that is much too 1960s.

The DVD includes an interview with Matheson. The most interesting part of this is his revelation that John Huston was apparently disappointed he wasn’t asked to direct the picture! Now that might have been an interesting movie. I suspect Huston would have taken a bolder approach than Endfield. I can’t really imagine a Huston-directed de Sade biopic but it’s something to ponder.

Overall this movie is an interesting mess that often misses its target spectacularly but then at other times it unexpectedly comes up with the goods. It at least avoids the mistake of trying to make de Sade a conventional villain or a rebel hero, instead depicting him as a man whose view of the world is a mixture of insight and delusion.

A failure certainly but worth a look.

The Changeling (1980)

The Changeling was an attempt at a haunted house movie and if you were going to compile a list of all the mistakes you could make that would render such a movie ineffective then this one ticks every box.

George C. Scott stars as John Russell, a professor of music whose wife and daughter are killed in a freak car accident. He slowly starts pulling himself together and feeling that a change of scenery might help he accepts a teaching position in Seattle. At first he seems he’s made a great choice. Through his contacts in the faculty he is able to rent a glorious (and huge) old house from the local historical society. It’s perfect, giving him the peace and quiet he needs for his work (he’s a composer as well as teaching music). And the lady from the historical society (played by Scott’s real-life wife Trish van Devere) is rather nice and a friendship is growing up between them.

Everything would be fine except for the pesky ghost in the attic. It soon becomes obvious that John has not recovered from his personal tragedy as well as he’d thought. He’s a bit of an emotional mess and, perhaps because of this vulnerability, he’s also inclined to be remarkably ready to accept supernatural explanations for the odd goings-on in the house.

He makes a call to the local psychic research expert and is put in touch with a medium and soon it’s séance time. This ghost is very anxious to communicate and before long John is busily digging up people’s floorboards looking for murdered bodies and what he uncovers is a scandalous conspiracy from the past.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like subtle horror. I much prefer it to the more obvious kind. I dislike gore. Give me atmosphere and a slow building of suspense and dread any day. It has to be said however that it is possible to be too subtle. At some point you have to get scary. And in this movie it just doesn’t happen.

Even worse there is never any sense that the two main protagonists (John Russell and his new lady friend) are in real danger from the ghost. And there’s no-one else in the movie that we can possibly be expected to care about.

The movie’s flaws don’t end there. Too much of the explanation for the haunting is given away too soon and the explanation is banal and predictable. The villains are obvious and are such tedious clichés that their evil is too boring to make any emotional impact.

The whole movie has a bad TV movie feel to it, both visually and in the ineptness of the scripting and the flatness of the direction. The big horror set-pieces towards the end are silly and distinctly non-scary. Director Peter Medak has spent most of his subsequent undistinguished career in television.

George C. Scott is adequate but he doesn’t seem overly interested. No-one else in the cast makes any impression at all.

This one is not even worth a rental I’m afraid.

The UK DVD from Optimum looks OK but has no extras at all.

The Young Master (1980)

I’ve never been a huge fan of martial arts movies but I have slowly developed quite a love for the movies of Shaw Brothers Studio. I’m less familiar with the output of the major producer of Hong Kong action movies, Golden Harvest. After seeing The Young Master I’m inclined to think I might stick to Shaw Brothers productions in future.

This was Jackie Chan’s triumphant return to Golden Harvest and he wrote and directed the movie as well as starring in it.

I must confess that I have only the haziest notion of what the plot as all about. Two orphans, Tiger and Dragon, had been taken in and raised by the master of a kung fu school. Tiger betrayed his master by helping a rival school to win the lion dance competition, and was banished in disgrace. His master later relented and sent Dragon (Jackie Chan) to fetch him back.

Somehow the plot then gets involved with bank robbers and with Dragon being mistaken for an escaped criminal. The action sequences are non-stop and there’s little time for coherent plot development, but then coherent plot development is probably not what the audience for this film was going to paying their money to see.

It’s mostly played for comedy and the comedy is very broad and relies a good deal on slapstick. It’s a style of comedy that has never done much for me and as a result I found this movie to be pretty heavy going. Of course if you enjoy this type of humour your reaction to the movie is probably going to be quite different. It’s just a matter of personal taste.

The fight scenes are frenetic and spectacular enough but they lack the elegance of the fight scenes in Shaw Brothers movies. Again it’s a matter of personal taste.

The acting is as broad as the comedy. Jackie Chan is likeable enough.

I don’t want to put people off because really my fairly negative response to this film is mostly due to the fact that this sort of movie is just not my cup of tea.

Pilot X (Death in the Air)

Pilot X (also known as Death in the Air) is a mystery thriller, but it’s odd enough to be of interest to cult movie fans. Any movie that combines aerial dogfights, a murder mystery, a love story and psychiatry is a winner in my book. And being the 1930s (it actually came out in 1936) the psychiatry is in the form of delightfully half-baked Hollywood Freudianism, so that’s another major plus!

It was produced by an obscure Poverty Row studio. Director Elmer Clifton had been making pictures since 1915, most of them evidently low-budget efforts including hordes of B-westerns. His career had started promisingly but by the end of the silent era he had become strictly a B-movie director.

Passenger aircraft in the US are mysteriously disappearing. It soon becomes evident that even though it’s peacetime, they’re being shot down. By an insane pilot identified only by the huge X painted on his aircraft’s wings. Several of the downed planes belong to an American aircraft manufacturer rather unfortunately (this was 1936 remember) known as Mr Goering. He hires US Army pilot and part-time amateur detective Jerry Blackwood to track down the mad killer, with some assistance from psychiatrist Dr Norris. Dr Norris decides it’s a case of war-time neurosis, an air ace who is driven to keep increasing his score of kills even after the war is over.

It transpires that there just happen to be five wartime air aces living in the neighbourhood so they are all invited to participate in the hunt for the crazed killer, who is presumably one of their number. They are all invited to base themselves at Mr Goering’s house while they fly patrols looking for Pilot X.

The acting is wonderfully bad even by B-movie standards, but the concept is so pulpy that it just adds to the enjoyment.

The aerial sequences are reasonably impressive - in fact by low-budget movie standards very impressive. The murder mystery is at least moderately clever. Of course it goes without saying that the aircraft manufacturer has a beautiful daughter (OK, in this case she’s his ward, but she fulfills the same plot functions) and naturally she becomes involved in a romantic triangle between Mr Goering’s son and Jerry Blackwood.

There’s also a memorable mad scene of operatic proportions involving one of the air aces, an RAF flyer with a very bad case of shell-shock. It’s all very silly but it’s fairly well-paced, it’s off-beat and it’s highly entertaining if you accept on strictly B-movie terms. It’s certainly worth a look.

It’s released on DVD by Alpha Video and it’s also available for download at various sites (quite legally since It’s a public domain movie).

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

Hammer Films had been around for quite a while and had enjoyed considerable success with their excellent 1955 science fiction horror offering The Quatermass Xperiment but it was The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 that really put them on the map, and in the process relaunched gothic horror as a profitable movie genre.

Terence Fisher had already helmed many movies for Hammer including a couple of science fiction films and a superb and somewhat gothic-influenced film noir, Stolen Face. He was an obvious choice to direct Hammer’s most ambitious project to date. Hammer has decided to redo the most famous of the Universal monster movies of the 30s, but in colour and widescreen and with rather more sex and violence. It proved to be an extremely astute decision, and Hammer’s choice of Fisher as director and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as the stars was equally inspired.

With Jimmy Sangster writing the screenplay and Bernard Robinson as production designer Hammer had assembled what was to prove a formidable creative team.

The plot of The Curse of Frankenstein does not stick too closely to Mary Shelley’s novel or to Universal’s 1931 version. Which was probably just as well. The enormous success of the film was due to the fact that it felt like a completely fresh approach to the gothic horror genre.

In this new version Baron Frankenstein’s assistant is his former tutor. Paul Krempe had been his willing collaborator until Frankenstein’s experiments started to become more extreme, and his methods more morally dubious. Paul stays only because he is afraid to leave Frankenstein’s beautiful cousin and intended bride Elizabeth alone in the house with the increasingly obsessive Baron. Paul tries to persuade Frankenstein of the danger posed by his latest experiment, the creation of an artificial creature made up of assorted body parts, but to no avail.

Paul’s efforts to stop the Baron result in damage to the brain that has been earmarked for the creature. This not only has disastrous consequences for the creature - it also pushes Frankenstein even closer to the edge of madness as he blames Paul for sabotaging his great experiment.

The most revolutionary thing about this version is Peter Cushing’s performance as Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s book and most film adaptations raise the question as to who is the real monster, Frankenstein or the creature he has created, but in this version there’s absolutely no question at all - it’s Frankenstein who is the monster.

And he’s not an idealistic scientist who gradually succumbs to the temptation to play God, nor is he a well-meaning essentially good man who slowly loses his moral compass as his experiments get out of hand. With Cushing’s Frankenstein it’s clear that the seeds of madness and evil were there right from the start. Right from the beginning of his scientific career he was prepared to pursue ends and to utilise means that were not just morally dubious - they were clearly and unequivocally immoral.

While Boris Karloff had endowed the creature with a certain dignity and made him rather sympathetic in Hammer’s version Christopher Lee’s creature is a pathetic shambling wreck, a hideous reflection of the moral vacuum in its creator’s soul. The focus in this film is entirely on Frankenstein, and on the character flaws that drive him to destruction and disaster. It’s an acting tour-de-force by Cushing. In the later Hammer Frankenstein films the Baron would at times be portrayed in more equivocal terms and Cushing arguably gave more nuanced performances but the sheer power of his performance in the 1957 film is breath-taking.

The first half hour is a little on the slow side but after that the pace picks up and Fisher is in complete control. Some of his earlier films are extremely good but it’s clear that gothic horror was the perfect genre for his talents and his mastery is already evident here.

It’s not my favourite movie of the Hammer Frankenstein cycle but it was certainly an impressive beginning.

Warner’s DVD release can’t really be faulted so far as the transfer is concerned although the lack of worthwhile extras is a little disappointing.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

The Creeping Flesh looks superficially like a fairly typical Hammer gothic horror flick, and mostly it is, although in fact it was made by Tigon Pictures rather than Hammer. With Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing heading the cast and Freddie Francis directing this is a solid effort with a few interesting features that make it worth seeking out.

Peter Cushing was always at his best playing mad scientists, and Professor Emmanuel Hildern is certainly eccentric if perhaps not actually mad. He’s a much more kindly character than Cushing’s Dr Frankenstein from the Hammer Frankenstein films, and that is in some ways the professor’s downfall. He really wants to do good. He is obsessed with the idea of evil as a disease, a disease than can be cured. It might even be possible to inoculate people against evil. His obsession stems from personal tragedy. His wife, a music hall star, has been confined to an asylum for the criminally insane for many years. he is terrified that the madness might be passed on to his daughter Penelope.

The asylum is run by his half-brother, James Hildern (Christopher Lee). James is also involved in scientific investigations into the nature of madness. He has always been somewhat in his older brother’s shadow professionally but Emmanuel has become increasingly isolated from the scientific community (apart from his ideas on evil he also holds eccentric opinions on human evolution). Emmanuel’s star is fading while James’s is rising.

Emmanuel has brought back a skeleton from an expedition to New Guinea, a skeleton he believes will restore his standing in the word of science. This skeleton seems to have some very unusual properties - when exposed to water it grows new flesh. Emmanuel thinks New Guinea folklore may hold the key to this mystery, and that the skeleton is a representative of pure evil. As such the blood (for it grows blood vessels as well as flesh) could be used to manufacture a vaccine against evil.

Of course things go horribly wrong. Emmanuel receives word that his wife has finally died. His daughter believed that her mother died many years earlier and when she discovers the truth she does not take it well. Emmanuel has tried, perhaps too hard, to shelter her from the world. Now he will pay the price for his mistake.

Emmanuel Hildern is not an evil mad scientist but his own obsessions have clouded his judgment very badly, and his isolation from the scientific mainstream has made him increasingly prone to idiosyncratic and even deluded ideas. Cushing is very much the star and he gives an impressive and rather subtly nuanced performance.

Christopher Lee as James is almost as interesting. If personal tragedy and scientific neglect have distorted Emmanuel’s character then ambition and jealousy of his more famous elder brother has also distorted James’ mind. He dreams of winning a major scientific prize and he is prepared to adopt very unethical methods in order to do so. He’s a delightfully smarmy and sinister villain and Lee has a great time with the role.

Lorna Heilbron is superb as Penelope, the daughter who becomes an unwitting victim of her father’s unwise experiments. Her descent into madness is quite chilling.

Freddie Francis was always a reliable enough horror director and on rare occasions when a story really engaged his interest he could be quite inspired. He has some very good moments in this production. He was of course more famous as a cinematographer than as a director and this background allows him to pull off a couple of good visual set-pieces, especially the flashback sequence of Emmanuel’s wife’s mental breakdown. Francis’s use of distorted images is both visually impressive and a very economical and effective way of filling in the backstory.

By the standards of 1973 it’s rather tame - no nudity, very little gore.

All in all it’s a pretty decent gothic horror effort, and certainly worth getting hold of if you’re a fan of Cushing and Lee.

Columbia Tristar’s DVD is a satisfactory widescreen release although some extras would have been nice.