On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1951)

After beating a suspect to death, cop Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is sent out of town on assignment: 

In a small country community, a young girl has been murdered and the suspect is on the run.

Jim joins the girl's father (Ward Bond) in the manhunt.

Stumbling upon a farm house, the pair hole up for the night with the house's sole occupant Mary (Ida Lupino).

As the night progresses, Jim and Mary are drawn together - and Jim is forced to confront his own nature...

Before anyone asks, no, this is not a prequel to Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground.

Now that that the shit joke is out of the way, onto the movie.

Directed by Nicholas Ray (with some uncredited contributions from star Ida Lupino), On Deadly Ground feels like a companion piece to his previous movie, In A Lonely Place.

Both films are studies in masculinity, and specifically the frailties and weakness behind their rage.

Nobody is better at volcanic rage or emotional inarticulacy than Robert Ryan.

 

With his deep-set, blazing eyes and the whiff of suspicion from his sullen mouth, just as likely to flash into a terrifying, gnashed grin, Ryan embodied the dark side of the white American protagonist of the fifties. 

What is compelling about Ryan is the vulnerability, the weakness, underpinning the monsters he plays.  

What is terrifying about Wilson is how easily he gives in to his baser instincts. When a suspect lies to him in an early scene, he seems almost elated that someone has crossed him. 

This relish is recalled later in a scene when he realises Mary has lied to him. As he looms over Lupino, Ryan smiles - he cannot suppress how much he delights in violent punishment, even with someone he has an emotional connection with.

Like Bogart's Dixon Steele from In A Lonely Place, Ryan's Wilson is forced to reckon with himself. Unlike Steele, Wilson seems genuinely conflicted about his own nature - particularly when he is paired with Ward Bond's father, who has been driven homicidal by the death of his child. 

Unlike In A Lonely Place, Wilson chooses redemption - Wilson leaves New York to stay with Mary. The implication of this ending - and the film prior - is that Wilson's nature had been warped by his job. Or perhaps it merely gave him a licence to let his id run riot.

Or maybe this climax - so neat in its resolution - is not literal: maybe it is Wilson’s delusion of a happy ending, as he retreats back to his old stomping grounds, unable to resolve his traumas.

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BITE-SIZED: Nightfall (Jacques Tourneur, 1956)

Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) is on the run.

A victim of tragic circumstance, he is the primary suspect in a murder.

The culprits - a pair of cold-blooded bank robbers, John (Brian Keith) and "Red" (Rudy Bond) - are still on his trail.

Will he be able to clear his name before they find him?

It is rare that I get to see a movie with absolutely no prior knowledge.

I did not even know this movie existed until I saw it advertised on a double bill with another film I will be reviewing.

I’m glad I went in cold (har har).

Nightfall is not a secret masterpiece but it is a solid man-on-the-run thriller

Aldo Ray is effective as the put-upon hero, while Ann Bancroft is well-cast a tough model who gets swept up by the excitement of his predicament. 

The standouts are Brian Keith and Rudy Bond as the villains. Keith is the cold-blooded mastermind, completely at ease with any depravity if it gets him closer to his goals. Meanwhile, Bond is a giggling sadist.

It is a solid thriller - the script uses a few too many flashbacks, but otherwise it builds some effective tension. 

Director Jacques Tourneur made his name with the classic horror film Cat People, and while this film does what it says on the tin, one wishes it had a little more imagination in the execution.

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BITE-SIZED: The First Power (Robert Resnikoff, 1990)

Detective Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) has been on the trail of serial killer Patrick Channing (Jeff Kober), who has been scattering pentagram-scarred victims all over LA.

When Logan finally captures Channing, and he is executed for his crimes, he assumes the menace is over.

But more bodies turn up, scarred with the familiar pentagram symbol.

Is there a copycat loose?

Or something more satanic?

Sometimes a movie works like junk food. It is not giving you anything beyond a specific taste and sensation.

Such is The First Power.

There is nothing about it which is particularly original: it is assembled from bits of The Omen, The Exorcist, Nightmare on Elm Street, Angel Heart, Halloween and The Hidden.

If you are familiar with the latter, The First Power may be rather familiar - just replace the alien with a satanic ghost and you are most of the way there.

The First Power was and is not treated as a critical success - I only watched it after being intrigued by the How Did This Get Made episode on it.

I can see why people dismissed it - and yet something about it makes it compelling.

Part of the reason is the villain - Jeff Kober is so compelling as the grinning satanist. His deep voice, piercing eyes and too-wide grin are living special effects, and more uncanny than any of the films' attempts at the diabolical.

The biggest problem with the movie is how underwritten it feels.

The film has a vague sense of mood, with a disconcerting, minimalist score by Stewart Copeland and eerie location photography by Theo van de Sande.

But Phillip's lead character lacks depth and a sense of internal development. His relationship with psychic Tess Seaton (Tracy Griffith) never really develops. The only change he experiences is realising that the villain is a demonic body jumper.

The movie almost feels like it could work as a mood piece - if it was not so plot-dependant. 

It does not help that the film never really defines the antagonist - so the attempt at a cliffhanger ending lacks any bite.

It is not completely lifeless - a late set-piece involving a possessed unhoused woman stalking our heroes is genuinely effective - but it never comes to life.

A real oddity, The First Power feels like the perfect jumping-off point for a remake.

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Showdown in Little Tokyo (Mark L. Lester, 1992)

An American cop raised in Japan, Chris Kenner (Dolph Lundgren) is the head of the Asian Crime Taskforce in LA.

Though paired with a new partner, green officer Johnny Murata (Brandon Lee), Kenner is determined to play by his own rules.

However, when yakuza crime lord Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) begins a violent takeover of the city’s underworld, the mismatched partners have to overcome their differences to take the bad guy down.

I love Commando.

I also enjoyed Night of the Running Man.

Both movies are directed by Mark L. Lester. I am in the bag for a Lester action joint.

For some reason, I have never managed to get through Showdown in Little Tokyo. I think I tried to watch it a few years ago, but I do not remember finishing it - until last week.

I have been on a mini-run through the films of Dolph Lundgren, and that led me back to this movie.

A lot of action stars are not the best actors. Sometimes they have a specific skillset or an on-camera presence that works for the genre.

Man, this movie really throws in Lundgren in the deep end. In the right role, he can be good - see Men of War or even I Come In Peace.

This is early enough in Lundgren's career that he still comes off a little wooden, but the bigger problem is that he is not the right fit for this kind of buddy movie.

Here he is playing a character who is the best at everything - Lundgren is so flat he comes across as an asshole. With the right star, it might have worked - but I doubt it.

Brandon Lee seems to have a better idea of what this kind of dynamic needs. He is bringing the right energy for a buddy cop dynamic - he is all loose energy to contrast with Lundgren’s more zen veteran.

On the downside, he does not have the material. The script makes him ridiculously ignorant - almost all of his lines are asking questions that make him look silly (he does not even realise that Malibu Beach is a different police department that LA).

The key issue is that the movie does not give them any kind of arc - they hate each other until the movie needs them not to.

In any other movie, these issues might work against it - but they are irrelevant to the experience.

I am a fan of short runtimes - this is 78 minutes long and does not need to be longer.

And while the script does him no favours, Lee shines. He is fantastic in the fight scenes, bringing a speed and dynamism that his lumbering co-star cannot match.

Trashy and over-the-top, the film often feels like a comic book, with flashy colours, graphic compositions, and characters styled in extreme versions of forties fashions. It sometimes feels like an R-rated cousin to Dick Tracy or The Rocketeer, only super-violent and packed with nudity.

If I was trying to come up with a mood board for the early nineties action movie, Showdown in Little Tokyo is a pretty solid exemplar of the genre.

 
While the leads are mismatched in ways the film did not intend, it does not miss with Yoshida (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). Hi gives Yoshida a near-diabolical relish for his various misdeeds.

Tagawa cornered the market on Asian villains in the early nineties (most famously, Mortal Kombat). He was so identified with villains that the film Rising Sun savvily cast him as a prime suspect in the central mystery.

His villain is almost all-timer - he does not get a lot to do, but what he does is so extreme (cutting off a woman’s head while he has sex with her and she smokes meth - and while someone else films it!).

Tagawa plays it low-key, giving the character a simmering rage that makes his sudden explosions of violence pop. Because of the shortened runtime, he is truncated to just being a completely evil antagonist who must (and does!) be terminated with extreme prejudice.

The portrayal of Japanese culture is also limited - the film tries to set up a juxtaposition

by having Kenner be the fountain of Japanese culture and enlightenment, with Murata as the brash American youth, but the film does not have the nous to mine this dynamic for anything more than cheap jokes about an Asian American man being ignorant.

Best taken as a piece of sleazy, bullet-riddled nonsense, Showdown is too short to become annoying. Its stars might have better vehicles, but there is something weirdly compelling about this movie's lack of anything beyond forward momentum.

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The Selling of Vince D'Angelo (Danny DeVito, 1982)

Structured around the evolving media campaign of independent senate candidate Vince D’Angelo, this short film is a dark satire about the campaign of an unscrupulous candidate.

Bracketed by entertitles, the film plays like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, cutting between campaign adverts, press conferences, and behind-the-scenes footage from all of these moments, to show the candidate’s corruption and disregard for the norms and rules of campaigns, democracy and any other structure you can think of.

D’Angelo’s playbook could be seen as Trumpian - claiming to be taken out of context; claiming to be a victim of a smear campaign. While amusing, the montages showing D’Angelo talking out both sides of his mouth feel like they could be re-enactments of Trump’s news coverage. This is probably more a case of comic exaggeration being echoed by reality, rather than any unique insight.

A lot of D’Angelo’s tactics would only work in a pre-Internet era: He recasts his family for a campaign video and fakes an assassination attempt to put him ahead in the polls.

Sadly relevant in its portrayal of how populist strongmen can rise to power, the film ends a punchline which feels ripped from today’s headlines - and the role of media in focusing on coverage which will garner ratings.

 

While he is ultimately run out of town, despite/because of his escapades D’Angelo is revealed to be writing his memoirs, to be published by Simon & Schuster.

Despite running 20 mins, this short film exemplifies DeVito’s specific persona as a star:

Gleefully narcissistic, craven, greedy and selfish, DeVito remains likeable because of how little remorse he shows, and how much joy his characters take in getting one over.

DeVito’s persona is of a born carny, a conman forever looking for one more sap to bleed dry - and this mini-epic is a prime vehicle for his hyperbolic brand of pop misanthropy.

The pure cynicism of the final punchline - no matter how bad or awful, someone will pay for this story, and nothing matters if there is profit to be made - feels like a mission statement for the rest of DeVito’s career as a filmmaker.  

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The Dalton ellipses continues: a look at Bond 17 (Mark 2)

In this season of The James Bond Cocktail Hour podcast, we are covering the six year gap between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, covering everything James Bond-related, from books to comics to video games, to non-Bond properties which tried to fill the gap.

On the latest episode, we assess the second attempt at a 1991 draft for Timothy Dalton's Bond 17!

Check out the episode at the link below:

No Time To Die (review)

No Time To Die (commentary)

Pierce Brosnan - The Bond In Waiting 

GoldenEye & Spymaker - The Secret Lives of Ian Fleming

Nikita

Total Recall

Fire, Ice and Dynamite & Bullseye!

The Russia House

BrokenClaw

Lethal Weapon & Die Hard

If Looks Could Kill

Hudson Hawk

The Rocketeer

Black Cat

Timebomb

Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country

The Man From Barbarossa

James Bond Jr 

James Bond Jr. and other lost adventures, with Mark Edlitz 

Timothy Dalton's Bond 17 (Mark I) 

Permission to Die

Memoirs of an Invisible Man & The King's Man

Live Wire 

Sneakers 

Blue Ice

The Harry Palmer Trilogy

Freddie as F.R.O.7 

Death is Forever

Timothy Dalton's Bond 17 (Mark II) 

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Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932)

I first saw Kay Francis in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise over a decade ago. I had not given her much thought until I heard the podcast You Must Remember This’s episode about her.

Intrigued, I decided to check out the films highlighted in the podcast. 

Bored with her well-to-do but routine existence, the Baroness’s (Francis) one joy is gaining new baubles.

On her latest excursion to buy a piece of jewellery, the Baroness crosses paths with the Robber (William Powell), who is also interested in possessing the store’s merchandise.

While he is intent on stealing jewels, the Robber inadvertently steals something else - the Baroness’s heart…

“This is becoming delightful!”

A vehicle for Francis and William Powell, Jewel Robbery is a delightful European fantasy - a bored aristocrat finding love and purpose with a daring criminal mastermind.

This movie should serve as a template for streaming movies - 68 mins long and it focuses on a capsule drama between a few people in a few locations.

The film has the brevity of a good short story.

The first scene establishes a sense of luxury and pomposity - an expert demonstrates the new ‘invisible’ alarm system, only for staff to discover that the store has already been robbed.

This puncturing of the upper classes continues in the next scene: Kay Francis’s Baroness is introduced in a bubble bath - ionically, she expresses frustration at her life as her every need is literally attended to (she ends the scene being carried into her makeup chair).

After this introduction, the action shifts to the jewellery store and the titular set piece. 

When the Baroness confesses her inner boredom to would-be suitor ___ ( ), he treats it merely as further evidence that she needs to marry him.

Francis brings a guile and zest to the Baroness, particularly in her interactions with Powell.

Francis even sells the character’s fair weather feelings - she is briefly enraged when it seems like she has been robbed; only to fall deeper in love when she discovers her new admirer has returned her favourite ring

Powell matches her with a polite sense of frivolity -  a near godlike figure, he is able to infiltrate anywhere and slip out of any trap the authorities set for him. 

Rejecting violence, he is closer to a stage magician, orchestrating every element of his heist - he even includes music to provide a calm atmosphere. 

He compliments the Baroness, showing an attention and knowledge lacking from her supposed lovers.

The supporting cast are solid:

Henry Kolker and Hardie Albright bring the biggest laughs as the Baroness’s self-aware husband, and the Baroness’s hypothetical future husband, respectfully.

The film pokes fun at the pomp and snobbery of the aristocracy - stuck in time and completely out of touch. When the Baroness confesses her inner boredom to her sidepiece Paul (Albright), he treats it merely as further evidence that she needs to marry him. 

While the Baroness and the Robber share a love of the finer things (her prized ring - a symbol of matrimony - bonds them together in criminality. She half-heartedly tries to give it back to him but he refuses), they also share something else:

Sex.

Their burgeoning romance is infused with eroticism, and the film leans into the couple’s lust for possessions and each other without innuendo. Coming a few years before the Hays Code gained teeth, Jewel Robbery lacks the ellipses and more coded innuendo that would entomb cinematic desire (and other aspects of life) from American films for the next 30 years.

That openness to desire adds to the film’s sense of joy, and pleasure in pleasure.

Released in the depths of the Great Depression, Jewel Robbery is pure escapism.

The film ends with our heroes unpunished and unconverted to the side of ‘virtue’ - the Baroness stares down the camera with a cheeky finger to her lips, as she leaves for a rendezvous with her new lover.

Their romance is based on freedom - from obligation, punishment and structures of the upper classes. They get the spoils of being rich with none of the self-importance.

In its focus on a couple falling in love over crime, it feels like a spiritual predecessor to Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik.

Director William Dieterele was disparaged by Billy Wilder as a set dresser, constantly framing characters by props and set dressing. 

His style works for Jewel Robbery - characters are surrounded by opulence - and visualises the Baroness’s sense of entrapment and suffocation.

This becomes a refuge when she is with Powell’s Robber in his hideaway.

The brevity of the movie adds to its levity and sense of escapism - there is no danger that can be averted, or barrier that can stand between our lovers.

A real gem, no pun intended.

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Tetsuo - The Metal Man (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1988)

After he is infected by a strange metallic disease, innocent salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) finds himself rapidly overwhelmed.

Running only 67 mins, the film’s plot is almost like Cronenbergian riff on a fairy tale:

An innocent salaryman is attacked by someone already afflicted with the metallic symbiote, and proceeds to undergo a transformation into the titular metal man. Most of the action is restricted to the claustrophobic confines of his apartment.

Powered by anxiety about the future, technology, the subordination of flesh to machine, and notions of masculinity, the film’s themes are matched by its aesthetics:

Shot in grainy black and white, the film’s distinctive handmade qualities - the lurching camera, jagged editing, stop-motion and a reprise of one of the earliest cinematic special effects, speeding up the film - give the film a pulsing sense of life, as the mechanised, rhythmic score builds a sense of inevitability.

The film’s style echoes the characters’ transformations - the Salaryman (Tomorowo Taguchi) and the Young Metal Fetishist (writer-director Tsukamoto) are covered in scraps of pipe and other used items and materials.

Even before he is affected, the grubby, cramped tunnels and apartments of the mise-en-scene, make the world feel like the metal has already taken over. The characters are already trapped. Giving over to the new flesh is ultimately a form of escape.

The Salaryman’s transformation is portrayed as a disease, transferred from a young woman who attacks him in public. This metallic affliction rapidly affects every aspect of his life, down to his fatal assault on his wife. It is violent and fatal, yet the film ends with the Salaryman’s transformation complete - what has been destroyed has given way to new life - a form of evolution. 

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