KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother

Once the door had been opened by Mel Brooks with "Blazing Saddles", it became inevitable that there would be comedies coming on a regular basis from the collection of crazies that had put that gem together. The follow up was "Young Frankenstein" and it's a better film, although maybe just slightly so. Parodies of  Silent films, Hitchcock, and Biblical epics would be coming down the pike soon. In addition to Brooks, Gene Wilder would direct some of these 70s and 80s comedies and Marty Feldman would write and star in some of them as well. Today's entry into my Throwback Thursday series is the first movie that Gene Wilder directed.

He had this idea for a comedy take off on Sherlock Holmes while he was working with Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn on "Young Frankenstein", and Wilder said that if he had been unable to cast the two of them in the film with him, he would have just skipped it. Fortunately, they read the script and liked it and both joined up to continue the shenanigans they had begun with Brooks. This is a farce with it's heart in the right place, and although it does descend to a couple of sex references that are mildly risqué, if you are watching with tweens and teen, you should be OK.

Mycroft was the brother that was mentioned in the original Conan Doyle books, and what Wilder has done is simply added a younger brother, frustrated by being in the shadow of his siblings and anxious to prove himself. Sigerson Holmes is a funny enough name and it fits with the other two Holmes siblings as odd enough but also slightly sophisticated. The name comes from an alias that Holmes used in a short story written by Conan Doyle. Both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are characters in this film but they are mostly in the background, with one big exception. There is a very amusing scene where Holmes and Watson are supposedly leaving London, which is why Sigerson is stepping in for him. It is a subterfuge, and the manner in which it is accomplished is very amusing.

Madeline Kahn was a national treasure who left us far too soon, but not before contributing to some of the greatest comedies of all time. In this film she is the romantic female lead,  and her character seems to be a variation of  Brigid O'Shaughnessy, from "The Maltese Falcon", you can never trust anything she says, and from the beginning Sigerson knows it. Kahn performs several dance hall songs from the era the film is set, the 1890s, and she has a great singing voice and can do the singing in a comic manner that is required. 

Marty Feldman also left us much to early and here he plays a combination of a Dr. Watson/Inspector Lestrade character. The comic bit that they create for him is that he has photographic hearing and sometimes gets stuck in repeating back information and needs a little push like a record that is skipping. As the comic foil to Wilder's Sigerson, the two of them are well matched clowns who carry off both some verbal humor and some slapstick. 

There are some great visual jokes, like the duel on top of hansom cabs and the sets behind the scenes of the opera they participate in. Dom Deluise hams it up as a conspirator in the plan by the well known nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, Professor Moriarty. Leo McKern is the professor with a case of Tourette's syndrome. There is a sword fight near the end  and there was a  "Chekhov's Gun" set up early on. Wilder was in fact proficient in sword play having trained in fencing during his time in a theatrical school.  

This is ultimately a pretty sweet film although it has some distasteful moments. All of that will be forgiven when the Kangaroo Hop comes along. Enjoy.  

The Great Escape-Paramount Summer Classic Films Series

 

One of the reasons I took the approach I have for this blog, was so I can do exactly what I am doing now, writing about a film I love, because I saw it in a theater. I have watched "The Great Escape" dozens of times, I own it on Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, but I have never seen it in a theater on the big screen, what a magnificent film! The story of the biggest prisoner escape during WWII is told in a straight forward narrative with plenty of suspense and great characters along the way.

Take a look at this cast, it is very impressive. There are a ton of British actors that you will recognize, even if you don't know their names, and the American cast is stacked with legendary stars like Steve McQueen and James Garner. The film is nearly three hours long but never feels too long because all the pieces are put together so well. The plan is laid out for us, we know who everyone is and what their responsibilities are. There are great character points and a bit of humor here and there, but no one simply exists as comic relief. The one plot line that suggests it was designed to amuse us with humor, ends tragically and sets one of the characters on a different trajectory. 

Donald Pleasance, who had made dozens of things before this, first appeared on my radar as Blythe in this film. His fish out of water forger was sympathetic and ultimately tragic, which I think made him stand out for me for the rest of his career. He was Blofeld in "You Onley Live Twice", he was in "Fantastic Planet", "THX1138", a terrific TV Movie version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" and he is Dr. Loomis in the "Halloween" series. Heck, I even liked his parody of Robert Stigwood in "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". The relationship he and James Garner develop in the film is one that will resonate well with people who come together under trying circumstances.  Garner is great as a scrounger, he basically played the same character the next year in "The Americanization of Emily". Garner's aw shucks flim flam style will sustain him through a dozen future feature films and the television show "The Rockford Files". 

For a decade,  I was was sure that Charles Bronson was once an Academy Award Nominee for supporting actor for this picture. It wasn't until sometime in the 1990s, when I looked it up on line, that I discovered I was mistaken. Watching his performance however, I can easily see why I thought it was true. His character, Danny, The Tunnel King", is a man of strength who has a weakness that he faces repeatedly, but has finally reached a tipping point. His temporary abandonment of the tunnel as the escape route has some great moments of close up and voice performance. He is so solid in this part, and he mostly is stoic for the rest of his career, I see so much more that did not get played out as it could have in lesser films in his future. 

I don't know if anyone has ever talked about "The Great Escape" without mentioning Steve McQueen, and if they have, how could they do it and Why? McQueen is the top billed star in this film, but it is an ensemble picture, and he is not in it any more than many of the other actors. The reason everyone remembers him in the movie is because he is magnetic. His character is a defiant iconoclast,  who never the less fits into the military structure very effectively. His casual interplay with Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson contrasts nicely with the defiant reminder to the German Commandant,  that he is Captain Hilts. That was a moment of charisma so important, that it is reimagined for "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". Of course the biggest moment for him in the film is the motorcycle escape. My wife and I used to joke that if we watched the film one more time, this time he will make it over that second fence. 

Director John Sturges had a way with masculine adventure stories that seemed to peak in the 1960s. In addition to this film, he made "The Magnificent Seven" (also with Steve McQueen, James Coburn and Charles Bronson) and "Ice Station Zebra" the baby boomers gateway drug to submarine movies. Sturges often used Elmer Bernstein to score his films and in addition the his theme for The Magnificent Seven",  his iconic score for this film is well loved. I read somewhere, probably on IMDB, that soccer fans hum it during games. (I would have thought whistling Colonel Bogey's March would make more sense).

The fact that this is based on a true story and the techniques used by the prisoners were pretty closely followed in the film, give rise to even greater respect fore the fighting men of the Allied forces in WWII. The film makers do what must always be done in creating an entertainment, they romanticize some things, ignore the inconvenient, and have to change characters around. Still the film feels very honest, in part by the fact that there are no speaking roles for women in a P.O.W. camp. Hogan's Heroes would fix that later. This is one of those thousand films you must see before you die. so I have several lifetimes worth of viewing it to my credit.

Talk to Me

 

The trailer is included above, but like a lot of horror films, I think you will enjoy the movie more if you don't watch the trailer first. I knew nothing about this film before I saw it, except that there was a hand. I kept trying to call the movie "Take My Hand" or "Hold My Hand". When the film started, I suddenly discovered that it was an Australian film. OK, I did know that it was a horror film because that's why it was recommended to me. This is the debut feature film from Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou, who collaborated with a bucket load of people to come up with the idea and the script.

The premise will sound like a lot of other horror films, people get enamored with an object that seems to have supernatural abilities, and they end up taking the playful interaction with the spirit world too far. Maybe you remember JoBeth Williams as the Mom in Poltergeist, playing with the spot in the kitchen? It's like that, or as Ian Malcolm would say, "Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and um, screaming." The problem here is that you can't really run away. Somewhere there is also a fentanyl allegory here, because it does not take much to push things over the edge. 

Our hero is Mia, played by actress Sophia Wilde, a teen who is dealing with the grief of having lost her mother. She has adopted her friend's family as a surrogate when she has difficulty interacting with her dad. Here Best friend Jade and Jade's younger brother Riley are her closest confidants. Like all teens, they sneak out to party, but this time they are going to a gathering where people are taking turns interacting with the spirit world. I don't really believe in that sort of supernatural stuff, but I would not be taking those chances anyway, why tempt fate? Of course if people never made stupid choices, most horror movies would end before they begin. 

There are a couple of jump scares but the most horrifying moments are of self destructive behavior by those in the thrall of the supernatural hand at the center of the disturbances. Horror movies often leave things abstract, because an answer to some questions would minimize the mystery of what is happening. There is a bit of that here in the second and third acts of the film. Mia is drawn to the spirit world for one reason and repulsed by it for others.  Is she hearing the truth or is she simply imposing her fears on the voices she is listening to. It is not quite clear, and the resolution does little to make it easy to understand. 

I did think the final moments of the film work pretty well. We get some good suspense, an ironic outcome and a sense that the story is never really finished. Because we are seeing a distorted world it is not entirely clear how some of the other characters get resolved, but that is a minor quibble. The film was able to create a sense of dread, follow that up with some shocks and finish off with a frightening coda. That makes it a successful outing as far as I'm concerned and I would recommend the film to you. 

Valley Girl-Paramount Summer Classic Films Series

 

This entry will sometimes be less review and more nostalgia piece. I never shy away from sharing personal experiences about movies, that is why I started writing in the first place. If you don't know or care about me, it will be easy to ignore a lot of what I am going to talk about here. If you have a little patience and a forgiving heart, you may find some stories worth reading. 

Seeing this film on the big screen was always going to be a challenge for me, this is one of my late wife's two favorite films. She loved this movie from the first time we saw it in theaters, where we sat through it twice, separated by a bad Cheech and Chong film. After that, it was complete surrender. We saw it a few more times while it was in first run, and then it became a perennial favorite around the house. When the company with the rights was slow to put it out on DVD, I won an out of print Laserdisc copy on an ebay listing, by paying $70, more than twice what the original price would have been. 

It's easy to see why this movie can remain popular forty years after bursting into our consciousness, it's a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending. The mismatched cultural divide is pretty significant in the teen years. Young people are struggling to find a place where they fit in and that's why Julie, our heroine, is having a tough time. Even though her peer group acknowledges that Randy, our hero, is hot, they see him as an outsider. Different clothes, different music, different lifestyles mean that the divide is substantial enough to drive a wedge between two lovebirds that have been growing together for a time. 

The audience today, swooned at Randy at the beach, but laughed at his appearance when he and his buddy crash the party. The punk aesthetic embraced by Randy is a rejection of all that she and her friends use to create their identities. Nicolas Cage plays Randy like a smitten puppy dog who has a bone he won't give up, even to be with his dream girl. At one point he even verbalizes his distain for her culture when they venture to the club that is his second home. However, it begins to dawn on him that he needs to live in her world as well as hers. Cue the montage that has them at the mall, the club, the movies and all after he concedes that her parents seem to be ok. All of this takes place while the world embraces Modern English's one big hit "I Melt with You". The new wave band may have had the apocalypse on their minds when they wrote it, but after it's use in this film, it will always be a romantic song. 

There is so much humor in the film, it is easy to forget some dark moments. Tommy, Julie's old boyfriend, is a manipulative bully, who is likely to make her life miserable if she stays with him. It's true that the film introduced us to Nicolas Cage, but some other fine actors are in the movie as well. Michael Bowen who plays Tommy here, goes on the play the loathsome neo-Nazi Uncle Jack in the last season of Breaking Bad and a go to for Quentin Tarantino when an ass is needed. I can't say that Cameron Dye as Fred went on to stardom, but he has worked steadily. Fred was the perfect comic foil for Randy and the kind if  who pushes the right buttons in the wrong way. Dye's performance here delights me. If there is an underappreciated contributor to the film, it is the late Fredrick Forrest, who plays Julie's hippie Dad. He offers an adult view of what the kids are going through and he is supportive without getting maudlin. Forrest is also quite funny and matches up well with Collen Camp as Julie's Mother.

There are some side stories that were never going to go anyplace major in the film, but which offer some good background on the teen culture. Suzie likes Skip, who has a Mrs. Robinson interest in her step mother. Loryn gets used by Tommy and glares at him for the rest of the movie. Stacey never quite warms up to Fred, but does get to feel the sting of disappointment in her efforts to thwart Randy and Julie as a couple.

The soundtrack for this movie is filled with nostalgia from my years working in the Valley and commuting around L.A. while listening to KROQ. Sparks, Gary Myrick, The Plimsouls and Josie Cotten are all heard  in the film, and the Plimsouls and Cotten get substantial screen time, cementing my image of the music scene of 1983. 

I teared up a couple of times at the memory of how much my wife and I loved hearing "Monster of Love" as the soundtrack of a surprise seduction. That montage scene also provoked some water works, just because young love is precious and the sequence reminded me of my own life, enough that I could feel the moments even though I was older when the film came out. 

The audience at the State Theater was packed, I ended up sitting in the third row, a little close but fine. Everyone laughed and cheered and cried at the right moments. Maybe like me, they were remembering an earlier time, or maybe it's just that romance never dies. 

Blade-Paramount's Summer Classic Films Series

Once again, there is nothing like seeing a film with an appreciative audience. Last nights group gathered for a screening of Blade, was not massive like the Rocky Horror and Road Warrior Screenings have been, but they were loud and enthusiastic. From the moment that Wesley Snipes enters the picture, his every move was marveled at, cheered and certainly appreciated. "Blade" may be the coolest superhero to ever don tactical gear, sunglasses, and a katana. 

The back story does not matter much, let's just say that Blade is a vampire and a vampire hunter. This movie was a Marvel film a decade before the start of the Cinematic Universe they created. It has the trappings of most of the comic book movies of that era, techno music, early CGI and some story shorthand that is needed to get things rolling right to the action. The villain is a young handsome upcoming actor, Stephen Dorff, the plot gives Blade a female counterpart and a sidekick, and there is a conspiracy with the real authorities. Oh, and the climax of the film involves some mumbo jumbo about a Vampire God. 

Sometimes last night's audience was hooting at some of the outdated moments. The villain for instance uses a computer with some primitive graphics that might have been cutting edge in their day but now look quaint. Kris Kristofferson  plays the withering sidekick to Blade, and his indifference to the gasoline he is pumping while lighting a cigarette provoked howls because it was supposed to. By the way, Kristofferson is the spitting image in this film of my buddy Don Hayes.

Snipes gets to kick ass several times in the film. His opening salvo involves silver infused bullets that cause the vampires to explode. There is a nice scene with some stakes, a knife and the sharp edged boomerang that is supposed to have been designed by his partner. The main battle at the end however is a sword fight that would be impossible for him to win because of the supercharged nature of the villain. That might be a problem but the cool part is that Blade gets to perform what would have been the coup de grace several times in the scene. 

There are two sequels to this film, I don't think I have seen either of them. This is only the second time I saw this film, and it felt a lot like a first time since I remembered very little about it. I think the reboot should be pretty good, but let's face it, no one is going to replace Wesley Snipes. Mahershala Ali will be cool, but he won't be cool in the same 90's way. 

Meg 2: The Trench

Ah, now eventually you do plan to have megalodons, in your megalodon movie, right?

For a movie featuring giant sharks, there is an awful lot of tangential story development and action that features big sharks only in the background. At least Spielberg had a reason the shark was not seen much in the opening act of Jaws. Director Ben Wheatley seems to think this is an espionage, action thriller and that the sharks are not really why we are coming to see this movie. The movie starts with a James Bond of the Oceans sequence, then spends a big amount of time playing Armageddon games. Then the movie transitions to Die Hard on the high seas, before turning into Jurassic Park of Thailand. Finally we get to the good stuff, and what do we have? Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. 

Look, this was always going to be a popcorn picture that we laughed at a little, but still felt like it should be taken seriously. That does not happen. There is nothing you can take seriously in this movie. When we start meeting the new characters, the first one is basically working on his Iron Man suit. The villains you can pick out in a few seconds of screen time and the set up for the climax moment is presented as if the character who will use it did it as an afterthought. 

I like Jason Statham films a lot, but there are getting to be too many "Fast and Furious" imitators out there and if he is going to be in all of them, he will be overstaying his welcome. He is great in the action scene opening, and he does a great impression of Ed Harris without the liquified oxygen. When we get to the actual shark battles that come at the end, he looks good enough on a jet ski, but the cars and motorcycles of the other series probably make this feel like a repeat. So many of the shots have a deliberately cartoon feel to them that there is no suspense at all. I understand the presence of  sub-titles since the film is partially produced by Chinese interests and will be marketed there, but some of the Chinese style shorthand in storytelling, makes the film even more like a Syfy weekend programmer, in spite of it's budget.

Shortcuts are taken everywhere. How did the most technologically advanced company in the world not know that part of it's resources were being given steroids, so that an even more advanced technology can make the impossible, possible? The cash and resources can't be covered up like a bookkeeping mistake. The usurping of the chain of command is also something that just does not get explained. Maybe Chinese audiences expect that from capitalists, I don't know or understand. The secondary heavy, a bad French sailor, is smart enough to know that a boat engine will draw a meg to a boat when he is warning his troops, but twenty minutes later, he is clueless and we know bad stuff is going to happen to him. 

After we have escaped Blofeld's drilling platform, oops, I mean Jing Wu's scientific sea station, we relocate to an area that will give the audience the surrogate thrills they are seeking, but it pays off a lot less interesting than the first fill. Even with Megmouth Cam. To punch it up, other characters have to become action heroes, and against all odds they do.  Of course it requires the bad guys to ignore the common threat to everyone on "Fun Island". Yes, it is actually called "Fun Island". It's been five years since the last film, and that interval resulted in the laziest writing you are going to get in this summer's film lineup.

"The Meg" was so much fun, you just assumed that a sequel would have it's moments. No, it doesn't. it's like a beached shark instead of a beached whale. The crowds will stand around it for a little while, but after a few days, the smell will drive them away. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.

W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings

This is a piece of Southern Cornpone that was exactly the kind of thing that would fill a summer night perfectly. Burt Reynolds plays W.W., which doesn't stand for anything, a slick gas station hold up man with a charming approach to his victims and all the confidence in the world. The film is set in 1957 at the crux of country and rock and roll music. W.W. gets tied up with a local band wanting to make it big and he tries his best to help them because he is smitten with Dixie, the singer/guitarist and he wants to prove himself to the doubting members of the band. He drives a fancy gold and black Oldsmobile and continues to steal as he is also becoming the manager for the band.

An additional advantage of the film is that it is filled with musical numbers that are pretty entertaining, as long as you can enjoy some country music. Ned Beatty even gets to sing a number. We get a tour of old Nashville, including the Ryman Auditorium which used to host the Grand Old Opry. So the historical surroundings make the film worth a trip as well. The film is full of a lot of colorful characters, some of whom are not particularly attractive. There are several country music stars in the film including Jerry Reed who worked with Burt Reynolds several times in movies in the 1970s.

This film should be better known because it was made by director John G. Avildsen, who would win the Academy Award the next year for "Rocky". You can see some clever little touches in the transition swipes in the film, they are almost certainly attributable to Avildsen's decisions on making the film feel so corny and hip at the same time. Reynold's was apparently irritated by Avildsen however, because the director was not very understanding of the stutter that singer Mel Tillis suffered from, and Tillis appears as one of the gas station attendants that W.W. holds up.

Of course the whole thing would fall apart if Burt Reynolds had not turned on his charm to eleven. The story is dependent on Southern mannerisms and it has some fun with everyone being so polite even when they are robbing, swindling, or chasing the crooks.  W.W. is not such a bad guy but he is way over confident when the stakes get higher and his inability to solve the problem he is faced with in the one chance to get some drama into the comedy and chase scenes. 

The film is full of verisimilitude with cars, clothes, and songs that are all from the era. The car W.W. drives for most of the movie is an interesting automobile with a real history, and the country and religious stations that are featured on the radio also sound like the real deal. The backroads that W.W. and the band travel are probably unchanged even today, because those off the beaten path Farm to Market roads, still look the same. 

There is a story arc for W.W., it is subtle but emotionally rendered. In the end, it is a minor film but a lot of fun.