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Mean Streets (DVD)
by pmcds
The usual glitz and glam of gangster films is in the far distance in this gritty street gangster film from martin Scorsese. It's a film that cemented not only Harvey Keitel as a cult gangster actor, but also Robert De Niro as a firm Scorsese favourite.
Keitel plays Charlie, a low down hood who dresses well and is keen to ... impress his boss in order to forge a career for himself and to make some money 'above board'. His attitude is very good as he constantly fears being sent to hell - he doesn't particularly like violence yet can't escape the career he has chosen to be in. Collecting money for someone isn't the most glamourous of professions, but when one of his best friends Johnny Boy finds himself in debt to Charlie's boss, the situation gets a bit awkward.
De Niro plays Johnny Boy, a gung ho carefree man seemingly on a mission to get himself killed, brash and rude to those he owes money to, and taking advantage of his friends. De Niro and Keitel bounce off each other brilliantly, and although they're not littered all over the screen for the entire film, they're clearly the two bigger players in the film, and Scorsese makes sure we know this.
The fact that there are decent stretches of the film which have one or the other not present is a good move. It provides more of a reality to the film and gives less hopping from scene to scene. We're able to follow one strand of the story for a decent period of time, particularly as Scorsese tries to show us the humanity Charlie has and how he is trying to juggle all manner of things to make it all work. He is seeing Johnny Boy's cousin, who has fits, and this doesn't make it easy with him being warned to stay clear of her on numerous occasions. But the main thing about it is the financial side. Every time a gangster film comes out, there's always someone with loads of money, making mob 'business' seem lucrative. The most lucrative we get here is Charlie's boss, and even he doesn't seem to have a great deal, or at least doesn't flash it.
This low down financial situation is probably the grittiest and more memorable element of the film, to be honest. The fact that the amount that Johnny Boy owes to Charlie's boss is significantly smaller than most amounts in similar films drives this home even more, and Scorsese focuses almost solely on the troubles that such as 'career' poses. The streets really are mean in this film. Apparently drawn on the director's own experiences at times, it paints a more realistic and believable picture than the high profile money flashing mob films we are perhaps used to, and despite the sheer brilliance of the Godfather films, this toned down street mob film delivers on impact just as well at times and is very memorable as a result.
This is well worth a watch. Keitel and De Niro are brilliant, the occasional moments of violence are awkward and not clearly choreographed, and nothing goes completely smoothly for any character, presenting a more believable tale than many other similar genre films. I was riveted to the characterisation throughout, and I think this is how the film is best described: a gangster film that focuses more on character than money, on family rather than The Family. It's an emotional tale and not one that just seeks to wow with violence and swearing. there is some of it, but it all seems to be in context. Recommended.
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Enter The Dragon (DVD)
by pmcds
1973 was a year that came not long after James Bond was still a relatively fresh phenomenon, Sean Connery's dulcet Scot tones wooing ladies and making men envious left right and centre. Up until this era, martial arts films had their roots and their consistent parade firmly in the East, but Robert Clouse's film very much mixes that which ... is pure Eastern (Bruce Lee and the martial 'way') with a very modern and Western style in terms of the plot and the presentation.
Enter The Dragon starts off showing us that Bruce Lee's character, Lee, is a master of the martial arts, the ethics ruling everything else. He is recruited by a governmental body to infiltrate a disgraced former Shaolin master's island lair where it is believed drugs and prostitution are the main business routes, with many agents and others falling foul and losing their lives, without anything to prove it.
Lee, along with a couple of other agents tagging along, enters a competition on the island, where he is able to display his fighting prowess at the same time as patrolling the island at night in search of proof of the dodgy dealings. There's a strong link here between this film and Bond films, although I would hasten to add that it's perhaps not as one way as you may initially think. Many elements of Enter The Dragon remind me of Bond films that have been made after this was made, and so I think there's a mutual existence going on here, something that modern cinema reciprocates on a regular basis. Crossovers between films are all over the place, there's no reason why this should be any different, I suppose.
Really, this set the boundaries for crossover styles between Eastern martial arts and Western films, and the genre has seen plenty of success since. The classic traditional martial arts films are excellent, but there's something familiar and comforting about seeing the mix between it and the West presented style. Clouse does a good job behind the camera, while his cast perform solidly in front of it. I don't think this film would be quite the impressive spectacle now that it was then, but purely for its combination of styles and bridging the gap it deserves a recognised place in cinema history.
I thought Bruce Lee was most at home within the fight scenes, and the power of his physical ability is mesmerising. The final battle scene is one to behold, and it's a tribute to his relative acting skills that he was able to show some sort of equality against his opponent when he was clearly the better fighter. In fact, throughout the film as the plot develops, there are timely interspersed fight scenes which balance the actual plot quite well, keeping the interest moving, the plot developing and the action to give our brains a break even though there's not much going on that can't be easily spotted.
Overall then, a clever and enjoyable Bond style martial arts film. Who knows: perhaps Bruce Lee would have made a good Bond at some point.....
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Creeping Flesh (1973) (DVD)
by hogsflesh
A film-only review. This is only available at the moment on a region 1 DVD, importable for less than £10. It's been on TV enough times not to make that particularly worthwhile, especially since the DVD has no special features.
One of the last decent gothic horror movies made in Britain, this is an unusual and rather bleak 1973 ... film. It features the classic horror double act of Cushing and Lee, and has something of the feel of Hammer, albeit with slightly better production values.
Scientist Emmanuel Hildern returns from his latest trip to New Guinea with a large anthropoid skeleton, which he is convinced represents a hitherto undiscovered link in the evolutionary chain. However, when he gets the skeleton's finger wet, it grows new flesh. Convinced, for some reason, that he's discovered the source of all the evil in the world, Emmanuel sets about trying to find a cure. A cure for evil. You can tell how well that's going to work.
Meanwhile, his unworldly daughter Penelope learns the terrible truth about her mother - that she didn't die when Penelope was a child, but instead went mad and was locked away in Uncle James's lunatic asylum. Panicking, Emmanuel injects his daughter with his experimental anti-evil drug with, ah, mixed results. Brother James becomes curious about Emmanuel's research and decides to steal the skeleton. And wouldn't you know it, he chooses a night when there just happens to be a sudden downpour...
This sounds a bit more complicated than it needs to be (there's also a subplot about an escaped lunatic), but it all coheres fairly well. Emmanuel has obviously neglected his daughter while he runs off to exotic climes looking for skeletons. He is shocked to see her reading a romance magazine, and clearly has issues with sexual repression. He believes that his wife was adulterous, and seems to have a distaste for any kind of physicality. (The finger that grows looks absolutely uncannily like a penis. At one point Emmanuel goes to pick it up and then flinches away in disgust, in the end grabbing it in some tongs. I guess we've all had mornings like that, right, guys?)
Emanuel is short of cash, and there's a fragility to him that evokes a lifetime's disappointment. He relies on the charity of his unpleasant brother, and his dreams of winning the prestigious 'Richter Prize' for his work on curing evil are all too obviously never going to come true. Emmanuel is played by Peter Cushing in one of his saddest performances. Cushing's wife had died quite recently and he was still in mourning when the film was made. He seems to be tapping into his own personal grief (or perhaps is just unable to contain it), which makes his performance incredibly effective - he is tortured and desperate and seems locked in his own little bubble of despair - but it also makes for uncomfortable viewing.
His brother, the head of the local asylum, is played by Christopher Lee in one of his trademark 'grumpy establishment figure' roles. He is a man who thinks nothing of shooting a misbehaving inmate, and brusquely informs his grieving brother that he's cutting his funding. He later turns politely evil (I mean, of *course* he does, he's Christopher Lee, but it's a little surprising how low he'll go to screw over his own brother).
The other notable cast member is Lorna Heilbron as Penelope, who starts out as a typical dutiful Victorian daughter, but is soon hanging around in shabby bars in a red dress doing textbook early-70s British actress mad acting - wide eyed innocence combined with a saucy, tooth-baring grin. She soon graduates to murdering people, and does it pretty well.
The director, Freddie Francis, made a lot of horror films in the 60s and 70s, but rarely made much of them. This is one of his better efforts, with some effective close-ups and a conclusion that's genuinely tense. He plays up the melancholy aspects of the story, and it's incredibly downbeat. Nothing goes right for anyone, really, and if it were just a bit nastier it would be a lot more highly regarded than it is. There's very little gore, sadly, and no nudity (although there is quite a lengthy attempted rape). In 1973 people needed redder meat, and this feels more old-fashioned than it actually is, its horrors perhaps slightly too cerebral.
The music - gloomy orchestral stuff - also feels quite retro, and Cushing and Lee, charming though they are, both look their age (there's a very obvious stunt double for Cushing during a horse riding scene). They'd just made Horror Express, another film in which they play rival scientists squabbling over the remains of a prehistoric humanoid creature. Must have been something in the air that year. The end of the film takes inspiration from the oldest horror movie of all, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
The skeleton itself looks impressive, but close ups show only too clearly that it's made of plaster. Again, when it finally gets wet and grows skin it looks good until you realise that it can't even flex its fingers. Still, it's an impressive looking beastie, a little like the half-glimpsed Devil in Blood on Satan's Claw.
Creeping Flesh is a decent late example of a type of film that had bloomed in Britain during the previous decade. Its story has enough novelty, and it's performed with enough commitment, to still be worth a look now.
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