Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) - He's GAY, ya get it?!?...

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The seething poster for Richard Brooks' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

QUICK REVIEW:

Paul Newman (Cool Hand Luke (1967)) plays the son Brick, who has indulged himself into a liquor-based pit as the family patriarch, Big Daddy (Burl Ives) returns home to his 65 year birthday and finds his family in a thick haze of mendacity.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the grand, condensed family-melodrama adaptation of Tennessee Williams' celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play, which controversially deals with a homosexual protagonist trapped in an unhappy marriage. This has been toned down beneath the floorboards in this the movie version, which seems contrary to the point of the whole film, and is sad, even to the point where Williams, who was gay himself, told people in line not to go see the film. Newman also was disappointed with the make-over.
Nevertheless the film is a great, gorgeous, multi-Oscar-nominated work with some societal critique in its edges and bitingly sharp dialog. The drama is intense to the point of high-pitched unreality, but the performances are great and the subtext bulging, so the parts stick together into a still rousing indictment of hypocrisy in the American nuclear family.

Burl Ives in the front in this still from Richard Brooks' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

The thunder roars, while Brick's corrupted brother, led forward by his devious wife 'Sister Woman' Mae (Madeleine Sherwood (The Changeling (1980))), rips and claws in their mother for the inheritance of their perishing giant of a father. Much in the film would have seemed sentimental twaddle, if it hadn't been for Ives' masterly performance that could just as easily have won him the year's Oscar, - if he hadn't won it already, for his performance in William Wyler's equally great The Big Country.

Paul Newman at the bottle, and Elizabeth Taylor letting him have it, in Richard Brooks' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Elizabeth Taylor (Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf (1966)) is also very good as the doughty 'cat', who is hanging on by her claws onto the burning hot tin roof of a torn family and a man who isn't meant to be with her.
Taylor most probably had a terrible time shooting the film, as she first got sick and then lost her husband Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash a couple of weeks into shooting. Less than a month later, she was back on set like a real trooper.
The film is directed by Philadelphia-born movie-maker Richard Brooks (The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)).

Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 2.3 mil. $
Box office: 11.2 mil. $
= Big hit

What do you think of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Ever seen a stage production of it?
Comparisons and other comments are welcomed

The Call of the Wild (1972) - Heston's sleigh dog adventure is a minor gem

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Snowy adventure blasts from this poster for Ken Annakin's The Call of the Wild

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The Call of the Wild is a pretty entertaining and unusual adventure dog movie based on the classic Jack London novel about a gruff man and his sleigh dog Buck. With another guy and a bunch of dogs, among them the evil Spitz, they head North to Yukon with the mail and meet ladies and hoodlums etc. on their way. - A lot of stuff happens.
Call of the Wild curiously fell into public domain shortly after its release, and there are therefore many very shabby quality versions out, and I saw one of them. It is a shame, since this film is definitely worthy of a decent restoration. As far as my research goes, it has not been given this yet, which is a disgrace.
The film was shot in Finland and has many exciting highlights among them a sled-pulling contest, and Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur (1959)), here as the tough John Thornton, is a personal favorite of Film Excess. Again in Call of the Wild he is a man who basically hates all people: "You can all go to hell!", as he says himself. - Cool!
The Call of the Wild is directed by English director Ken Annakin (The Informers (1963)) as an English-French-West German-Italian-Spanish (!) co-production. Heston in his autobiography In the Arena wrote that he was very unhappy with the film and asked people not to see it. The film had a bad reception and wasn't released in the US until '75.
- But I'm telling you, it's actually pretty good!

Another cool, 70's poster for this languishing pearl, Ken Annakin's The Call of the Wild

In lieu of a trailer here is a scene from the film. This has clearly been restored, so I am curious, if there is a restored version of the film out there somewhere

Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Unknown

What do you think of The Call of the Wild?
Other Ken Annakin films that you can comment on?
Please let me know if a restored version of The Call of the Wild exists

Cabin Fever (2002) - Eli Roth's awesome skin-rash-inspired breakthrough

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The iconic poster for Eli Roth's Cabin Fever

QUICK REVIEW:

A group of young people go into the woods to a cabin, where a strange, bleeding fella approaches them, and soon they begin contracting an eerie sickness one by one.
Cabin Fever is a bloody disgusting film, (a warm recommendation for horror fans and a warning for horror-phobiacs), a youth gore horror neo-classic with dark comedy touches.
The concept is old-fashioned as an 80's horror film, but the sickness part is all new (to my horror recollection), and co-writer/director Eli Roth (Hostel (2005)), whose feature debut this is, is so good at spinning one perverted super-scene after another, building on this one new device.
The music is a mischievous, adventure-ish mix by Angelo Badalamenti (Mulholland Drive (2001)), - whose involvement is quite a scoop for the film, - and Nathan Barr (Hostel: Part II (2007)). There's liberating humor, loony rednecks, sex and gore. And SPOILER everyone dies, of course. - It's just awesome!
Roth is finally directing films again, with The Green Inferno (2013) still mostly not out (troubled production!), and another film, Knock, Knock (2015) with Keanu Reeves already in the works.

Eli Roth had a skin rash on a trip to Iceland with his parents. - And it made him conjure this up! Eli Roth's Cabin Fever!

Watch the trailer here

Cost: 1.5 mil. $
Box office: 30.5 mil. $
= Huge hit

What do you think of Cabin Fever and Eli Roth's other films?
Looking forward to The Green Inferno and Knock, Knock?

Blame/La Culpa (2006) - Undistinguished Spanish abortion TV-flick

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Ugly poster for Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's TV movie La Culpa

QUICK REVIEW:

Blame is a Spanish TV movie that seems only worth seeing for Spanish film nerds, because it is both slow, weird and far-fetched.
A woman and her daughter move in with a lonely, lesbian gynecologist, and after an abortion, in which the fetus goes missing (!), murder begins to shake the large house.
It's partly about abortion, partly about Spain and a little bit about women. But it never comes together as a good movie. Some of it is due to the acting that isn't very realistic, in fact the characters often seem like strange soap-opera people.
This thriller drama from the otherwise horror-intended Peliculas Para No Dormir mini-series is a failure for its Uruguayan director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (Death Is Child's Play (1976)), who has worked mostly in horror films and TV production, but ended his almost 50 year long career with La Culpa.

Unfortunately unsubtitled trailer for this undistinguished TV-movie

Cost: Unknown
Box office: None
= Unknown

What do you think of La Culpa?
Any good Latino horror films that you can recommend?

Hell and High Water (1954) - Submarine action adventure with laudable mission: Prevent Cold War from going nuclear

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Several posters for Samuel Fuller's Hell and High Water remark that 'You see it without glasses in CinemaScope', - undoubtedly hinting at the time's short wave of 3D-film, - the first 3D-wave, - which, just as now, required that the audiences wore silly glasses

Hell and High Water is an atomic scare action adventure sub-marine thriller about a private humanistic-scientific submarine expedition to the Pacific to check out and possibly defuse a secret, Communist nuclear weapons base on an island in the neutral zone.
The film has an exciting premise and a good set-up. It starts with footage from a real nuke going off, provided by the U.S. Government, who insisted that certain colors be altered in case they would "reveal nuclear secrets."
The plot gets constructed around the reluctant, skeptical, realist captain, played without sentimentality by Richard Widmark (Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)) and the idealistic, pacifist professor Montel, played with serenity by Victor Francen (The Big Scare (1964)). As Montel brings his co-scientist professor on-board, he reveals to the stunned submariners that the professor is a fascinating, wildly attractive woman, played by Bella Darvi (Good Little Girls (1971) in her screen debut. She is multi-lingual and never aloof and quickly becomes an object of attraction, but only as almost certain death are over them does the strong, desired captain SPOILER kiss her under the red lights.
The film has good sets and action and was Oscar-nominated for its special effects. It also has a lovely sense of what one Internet commentator calls 'moral certainty', meaning that there's no doubt the Soviets are the enemy, and that our guys are the good ones, (but also that nuclear war should be prevented).
The big challenge for director Samuel Fuller and DP Joseph MacDonald (S.O.S. Ashiya (1964)) with Hell and High Water was to show that the wide, slim CinemaScope-format could also be used to good effect in something as seemingly ill fit for it as a claustrophobic submarine plot. They do that, quite impressively, and thus proved to producer Darryl F. Zanuck that CinemaScope "could be used for anything!"
Hell and High Water is ideal as an afternoon watch, especially for fans of war movies, submarines and/or westerns.

The details:

The reasons that the film never becomes greater than it does, are that it gets long somewhere towards the end of the voyage to the island and on the island itself, and that there are some inconsistencies in the script, which also asks us to take some leaps of faith with it a few times, where I think it comes out a bit weak instead.
The ending is one such, somewhat thick and unbelievable moment, as the enemy nuclear bomber is shot down and crashes on the next island, and its bomb goes off, (why we don't know), and the captain immediately tells his favorite woman professor that her SPOILER father, professor Montel, must have died there. It seems a hurried conclusion, considering the relatively small explosion in sight, until the Government footage is then inserted again.
The film is directed by Samuel Fuller (Underworld U.S.A. (1961)), who reportedly didn't like it and only did it as a favor to Zanuck for standing up for him, when his last film Pickup on South Street (1953) was attacked by J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI. Still, the film isn't at all bad work by Fuller, who added some of the film's best scenes.
Darvi was an interesting, tragic person; a miraculous WWII concentration camp survivor, who had since the war become a drunken gambler in Monaco, where she was found by Darryl F. Zanuck and his wife Virginia, who saw greatness in her and took her to Hollywood and even devised her last name Darvi from their own first names. But Darvi's acting capabilities were limited, and she had a lisp that also sometimes makes her speech hard to understand in Hell and High Water. The finality of her Hollywood career was secured with a sex scandal involving her and Darryl F. Zanuck. Mrs. Zanuck, who had treated Darvi as a kind of favorite niece, packed her bags and shipped her back to Europe. Here she made some ineffectual movie-roles and relapsed to drinking and gambling and eventually killed herself by gas in her Monaco apartment, and was only found after having been dead for ten days in 1971, 42 years old.

Watch the original, CinemaScope-pounding trailer here

Cost: 1.8 mil. $
Box office: 2.7 mil. $ (North America only)
= Uncertainty

What do you think of Hell and High Water and Samuel Fuller's movies?
Other Bela Darvi particulars are welcomed

Carlito's Way (1993) - De Palma's best gangster movie

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+ Best Adaptation of the Year + Best Gangster Movie of the Year + Best New York Movie of the Year + Most Undeserved Flop of the Year 

The murky poster for Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way

QUICK REVIEW:

Another strong film about Latino gangsters from Brian De Palma (Carrie (1976)).
This time in New York with a sympathetic protagonist, unlike in De Palma's celebrated Scarface (1983), and I regard Carlito's Way the better film by far, though most hold the bombastic '83 remake of Scarface (1932) in higher esteem.
The plot in a nutshell: Carlito wants to get out of crime, but owes his lawyer a service and gets fucked by him.

 

Al Pacino as Carlito Brigante in Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way

That is the main story here. It is an adaptation of two novels by Judge Edwin Torres.
Al Pacino (Heat (1995)) is superb; Sean Penn (Milk (2008)) is splendid as the disgusting, coke-imbibing, Jewish lawyer, but Penelope Ann Miller (Chaplin (1992)) doesn't seem quite strong enough to suit the film and her co-stars, - but was Golden Globe nominated for her effort, along with Penn anyway.
There are a few banal moments, but they can't change the fact that Carlito's Way is an extremely well-executed film. De Palma and great screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park (1993)) are highly intelligent film crafts artists, and structurally the film is very sound. It has good supporting roles as well, and an exciting finale chase.

 

Related post:

 

1993 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Sean Penn as the lawyer-from-hell, Al Pacino by his side, and James Rebhorn as the DA sending them a menacing look, in Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way

Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 30 mil. $
Box office: 63.8 mil. $
= Even Steven

What do you think of Carlito's Way?

Chinatown (1974) - Roman Polanski's masterpiece

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Irresistible German poster for Roman Polanski's Chinatown

QUICK REVIEW:

Private detective J.J. Gittes is first taken by his nose on a job of revealing a powerful water board scientist's possible adultery. He then learns that he's got a risky and much bigger, complex case before him.
Chinatown is a masterful film treasure that can be watched again and again to equal pleasure and stupefaction each time. It is a film noir mystery plot with many twists, full characters, great scenes, great lines and fascinating localities. A sophisticated masterwork through and through that marks Polish master director Roman Polanski's (Rosemary's Baby (1968)) only return to film in the U.S. following the brutal murder of his pregnant wife actress Sharon Tate by the Manson Family in Los Angeles in 1969. (Polanski was in Europe at the time.)
You get the sense that, besides the great script by Robert Towne (The Two Jakes (1990)), - which is what brought Polanski back to painful Los Angeles, and, outrageously, is the only Oscar-winning aspect of Chinatown, - in the direction there's no fooling around, no playing about: The tone is so consistent, the general feeling so deliberate, so controlled and elegant, all leading up to the overwhelming finale that still is a heart-stopper. The plot moves forward without pause throughout Chinatown as in steps that each of them reveal some more of the truth of the corruption for us; right until the finale in, where the structural code of the film is broken, so to speak, and all the ghouls come out of the closets in a rush of drama and violence and horror. If you let yourself be immersed in the film, the result is quite shocking, and it was the personal insistence and brilliance of Polanski that gave us the ending that we all now know and treasure so, (Towne's script SPOILER had a happy ending.) You feel Polanski's personal involvement in making this film and that is why Chinatown is his best film. He is there in the flesh throughout, (not only in the scene in which he's actually there and cuts open Jack Nicholson's nose), required by a profound personal wound to get this one right down to the letter.
Nicholson (The Shining (1980)) is great and gives one of his career's best performances as the smart, cheeky, ambitious Gittes. Faye Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde (1967)) is perfect as the mysterious femme fatale with a horrible secret. And John Huston (The African Queen (1951) director) is a great villain, the leather-faced master sinner, Noah Cross, whose religious-symbolic name seems to contribute to Polanski's fantastically dark, gloomy commentary and world view that suits this great noir perfectly and will make you shudder.
Chinatown also has an Oscar-nominated Jerry Goldsmith (Mulan (1998)) score which is recognized as one of the greatest of all time.
If you haven't seen Chinatown yet, you've got a hell of a movie in store, so take your time to sit down with some good coffee and perhaps a pack of cigarettes to watch it in one stretch. - You'll thank me later!

Related review: 

Roman Polanski: The Ghost Writer (2010) - A master at work

Great German poster for Roman Polanski's Chinatown

Another great poster, this one Spanish, for Roman Polanski's Chinatown

Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 6 mil. $
Box office: 29.2 mil. $
= Big hit

Do you agree on Chinatown's excellence?
Anything you'd like to add?

Coogan's Bluff (1968) or, Dopes and Hippies, Beat It!

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Overly cool Italian poster for Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff

QUICK REVIEW:

Coogan's Bluff is a decent 60's action crime drama flick in which Clint Eastwood (Where Eagles Dare (1968)) plays the man of the West, an Arizona small town deputy, who strays with a prisoner to New York, the big city, where hippies and drugs abound. As the conservative hero that he often played and certainly plays here, Eastwood will now have to clean up in some of the Manhattan mess!

A brown-suited Clint Eastwood involved in some heavy duty crime clean-up in Don Siegel's Coogan's Bluff

The title refers to the plight, which starts it all, when deputy Coogan bluffs his way into a hospital to get his prisoner, but fails and instead must chase the fleeing bum around for the rest of the film. It is also the name of a New York site.
Through the chase we are lubricated brown suits, red rubber boots, ponchos, round glasses, flowers, psychedelic montages and the particular funk-jazz tunes that characterize many films from the time.
Coogan's Bluff is entertaining in places, but is told in a very loose structure that might also have been a product of its time, (or of the fact that the film had seven drafts before the filmed version came about, which was heavily influenced by Eastwood's ideas and preferences.)
Notably, Coogan's Bluff is the film that brought Eastwood and master director Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)) together. It started a great collaboration that would also result in Eastwood's Siegel-directed starring films Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), The Beguiled (1971), Dirty Harry (1971) and Escape From Alcatraz (1979), their finest film together.
Coogan's Bluff was also the film that later was made into the popular TV-series McCloud (1970-77) with Dennis Weaver.

Related review:

Don Siegel: The Beguiled (1971) - Intense, erotic Civil War kammerspiel thriller

 Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 3 mil. $
Box office: 3.1 mil. $ (U.S. only)
= Uncertainty

What do you think of Coogan's Bluff?
What are Siegel's and Eastwood's best works apart and together, in your opinion?

Children of the Corn (1984) or, Zealous Kiddie Killers!

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Creepy, great poster for Fritz Kiersch's Children of the Corn

QUICK REVIEW:

Stephen King's (Pet Cemetery (1989)) presence is felt here, - he wrote the short story that the script is based on, - in red neck, USA, (actually somewhere in Nebraska.) The film is paved with religious symbols and an atmosphere that sometimes brings The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to mind, though this is less gruesome:
The story is staged as a simple, linear tale of travel without any hocus-pocus in George Goldsmith's (Nowhere to Hide (1987)) script, with Linda Hamilton (Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)) and a bunch of well-playing children. - Particularly the inbred fanatics are creepy, with their leader Isaac (John Franklin (The Addams Family (1991))) as the worst.
The score by Jonathan Elias (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)) and the editing by Harry Keramidas (Back to the Future Part II (1989)) are effective, and the film has some nice shocks along the way. It is directed by Texan director Fritz Kiersch (Tuff Turf (1985)).
Make sure to see a restored version of this strong low-budget religious horror flick that has spun no less than 7 sequels.

John Franklin as the freaky child cult leader Isaac in Fritz Kiersch's Children of the Corn

Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 0.8 mil. $
Box office: 14.5 mil. $
= Huge hit

What do you think of Children of the Corn?
Have you seen any of the sequels, and if so, how was it/were they?

The Lost Boys (1987) - A crazy 80's teen vampire bonanza

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The hip, youthful poster for Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys

The Lost Boys is a very 80's experience; a teenage vampire adventure comedy phenomenon based on the basic idea that Peter Pan could have been a vampire. In development and rewrites, this has been pushed very far out of the actual film though, so few people will ever think of Peter Pan watching the finished film.
It's about a small family of a mother, her two teenage sons and their husky dog Nanook, who moves to Santa Carla in California, where a youth gang of vampires have made the town 'the murder capital of the world'.
Very shortly into the film, it's clear that Lost Boys is a pretty crazy film and that it is squarely aimed at teen audiences, - in the 1980's!
Casting has obviously gone for the most psyched out punks as extras, and the film is accompanied by welcome pop and rock hits of its time (by INXS and Echo and the Bunnymen among others), fast cutting and extreme lighting. Many call this 'stylish', and it may be, but the overuse of colored lights in Lost Boys is not very elegant. The deep immersion in 80's fashion, (over)styling and music is fun and a treat for anyone with a penchant for it, but it's a galaxy away from 'hip' today.
Much of the action takes place in and around a theme-park, where Kiefer Sutherland's vampire gang hang around and cause trouble with no real explanation. Our hero is played by charming, frenetic Corey Haim (Lucas (1986)), who, - very symptomatically for the film and its audience, - receives his knowledge of vampires and how to slay them through comic books. They are actually passed on to him like the purest wisdom. One of the more experienced vampire hunters is Corey Feldman (Stand By Me (1986)), who is pretty bad in the film. The problem lies mostly in the script, which pushes so much for humor that almost all of the lines are silly, (and at least all of Feldman's.)
The plot in itself is silly, and some of the vampire rules seem to be taken rather lightly; (vampires entering the home without an invitation and the only girl vampire, who mysteriously never changes into one.) A few dramatic scenes might have helped elevate the film to the likes of Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985) and The Karate Kid (1984), which are some of the similar, but better teen-favorites of the time. Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)) is a great actress, and she's good as the mother, but the relationships and story there is very underdeveloped: The divorce, which is the underlying reason for the family's being without a father/husband, is only hinted at in one jokey line from her. - That's no good.

The details:

The Lost Boys is still an entertaining film, and older kids and teenagers may still love it. 
My favorite character in it, - and the funniest one in my opinion, - was the grandpa, played by Barnard Hughes (The Odd Couple II (1998)), who's got several funny lines and great delivery.
There's also some cool effects and vampire make-up:

You've never seen Kiefer Sutherland quite like this before, in Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys

The effects do, however, seem to run amok at the end, and continue and grow inexplicably out of control. It nevertheless seems well in line with the entire film's silly, amusing nature.
It is directed by New Yorker-filmmaker Joel Schumacher (St. Elmo's Fire (1985)).
Sadly, the charming lead Haim was already developing drug habits at the time of shooting Lost Boys, and would later go bankrupt and struggle with addiction for years, leading to his sad, early death at age 38 in 2010. R.I.P.

Watch the original trailer here

Cost: 8.5 mil. $
Box office: 32.2 mil. $
= Big hit

What do you think of The Lost Boys?
Have you seen other films with Corey Haim, and if so, how was he?

Cop Land (1997) - Stallone faces corruption and turns in some good acting in fine crime drama

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+ Best Crime Drama of the Year

Big leading men on the poster for James Mangold's Cop Land

QUICK REVIEW:

A taciturn cop in Garrison, New Jersey (Sylvester Stallone (First Blood (1982)) will have to be stumped on his feet many times, before he decides to clean up his town.
Cop Land is a very well-played cop crime thriller with a dream cast who all worked for scale to make it happen: Harvey Keitel (The Piano (1993)), Robert Patrick (The Sopranos (2000)), Robert De Niro (Casino (1995)) and Ray Liotta (Goodfellas (1990)) are some of the dirty cops, but Stallone trumps them all in his best acting performance to date. 
The film is well-written and directed by James Mangold (Walk the Line (2005)), who is unfortunately now fixed on throwing years of his career away into yet another superfluous Wolverine film. Before Cop Land, Mangold had only made one other feature, the romantic drama Heavy (1995).
Cop Land may not be unforgettable, but SPOILER the shoot-out at the end with the tinnitus is hard to forget and has real power, and it is a fine movie.
Paradoxically, considering its relatively small budget, this was a star-studded Miramax production with some very high pressure on its shoulders, and although it received good reviews and made money, it still wasn't considered enough. Stallone went out in 2008 to say that Cop Land "hurt" his career and started "the beginning of the end, for about 8 years". He's back in business now, and it's curious to think that he thought himself down for those 8 years considering the credits he still have from the period, but now, apparently, Stallone wants to risk career-slump again, because he is venturing out of the action genre for some 'real' acting again now in John Herzfeld's upcoming Reach Me (2014).

 

Related post:

 

1997 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Sylvester Stallone gained 40 lbs. to play Sheriff Freddy Heflin in James Mangold's Cop Land

Watch the trailer here

Cost: 15 mil. $
Box office: 44.8 mil. $ (US and Canada only)
= Big hit

What do you think of Cop Land?