Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Nevada Smith was a character in the hit 1964 film ‘The Carpetbaggers’, a former Wild West outlaw who becomes a film star.  Given that the film hints at Smith's early life being an eventful one, including a prison escape, s omeone had the bright idea of making this film two years later which tells the story of that life. Who better to play Smith than rising superstar Steve McQueen who had already enjoyed success in both a Western (‘The Magnificent Seven’) and a prison escape film (‘The Great Escape’)? Given that the whole thing is directed by veteran Henry Hathaway (who knows where to point the camera) and written by John Michael Hayes who had written the screenplay for 'The Carpetbaggers’ (not to mention 'Rear Window’ ten years earlier) what could possibly go wrong? Well quite a lot as far as the critics were concerned, and I too found this a hard slog.   For starters McQueen is badly miscast.  It’s not simply that he is about ten years too old, it’s more that the ro...

This 1964 French film musical, written and directed by Jacques Demy, is entirely sung, by a cast whose voices are all dubbed.  Add to this that the score, by Michel Legrand, contains only one memorable song and one would think this would be a film to avoid. But no, it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and I for one was totally taken by it, Francophile that I am. It helps that is stars a young Catherine Deneuve, and that it is gorgeous to look at despite being shot entirely on location in the port city of Cherbourg.  Demy achieved the picture's vibrant look by careful repainting of facades, the changing of wallpapers, etc. The story itself isn't very complicated, featuring as it does barely half a dozen characters, but on the other hand it does go in unexpected directions.  We start off with a couple of young lovers, Geneviève and Guy, who are separated when Guy is drafted to go fight in the Algerian war, but not before a night of passion, which has the...

Depending on your point of view this 1984 science fiction film is either a brilliant satire or an excessively violent piece of trash.   As a centrist dad I necessarily fall somewhere in between these two extremes.   It is set in some near future where a megacompany (Omni Consumer Products or OMP) is being paid to help the Detroit police force, which certainly needs it judging by the amount of crime going on.  When a cop (Murphy, played by Peter Weller) is shot to pieces and killed by a gang of sadistic criminals what remains of his body is used by OMP to create a cyborg policeman. It's debatable who are the most obnoxious characters in this entertainment, the aforementioned criminals or the top executives at OMP who have lost any semblance of humanity in their desire for money and power. Not altogether surprisingly it emerges that the head criminal and the CEO of OMP are in cahoots, and the story ends up as a kind of revenge tale with Robocop going after both of these vil...

This 1951 comedy starring Alec Guinness has a weird science fiction premise to it, the possibility of creating a  synthetic cloth that never wears out.   Sidney Stratton (Guinness) is obsessed with the idea, and given that he might be a brilliant scientist (rather than a simple crackpot) maybe he is right. No one though is prepared to back his ideas so he gets himself employed at textile mills in order to carry out experiments surreptitiously, before then getting fired when he is discovered. This is the pattern until he meets Daphne Birnley (played by the delightful Joan Greenwood) who thinks he might be on to something and persuades her father, who owns a mill, to give him all the resources he needs. Cue a series of comic explosions, but then (eureka) Sidney succeeds!  It will revolutionise the clothing industry and Mr Birnley is all set to tell the press of this amazing breakthrough.  Not only is the cloth indestructible but it repels dirt as well.   Sidn...

This 1967 Western by Monte Hellman (a new name to me) is a real oddity.  It has been described as an existential Western, a kind of ‘Waiting for Godot’ and it certainly has a minimalist narrative which after some initial scene setting reduces to the four main characters making their way across hot and inhospitable terrain. There are only four characters of note, of which Willett is ost ensibly the main one (played by the veteran Warren Oates). He's an ex-bounty hunter who is a stoical kind of guy who’s not easily taken in.   In contrast his young companion Coley is not very bright and is an accident waiting to happen. Then there is Millie Perkins playing someone given in the cast list as simply 'The Woman' (yes, it's that sort of film).  She's the driving character behind what little story there is, hiring Willett and Coley to take her to a place called Kingsley.    She won’t say why but Willett thinks he knows why. Willett has a brother, Coigne, and at the...

I recently watched 'Criss Cross', a film noir directed by Robert Siodmak and starring Burt Lancaster, which I was very underwhelmed by. Nevertheless I approached this film noir with the same director and star with high hopes, as it is a highly regarded adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway short story.  To add to my interest the story was adapted again, in the 1960s, in a terrific version directed by Don Siegel which I have fond if distant memories of. When I say adaptation that’s a bit of a stretch.   Judging from the plot summary on Wikipedia, Hemingway’s story is quite sparse - all that happens is that a couple of hired hit men turn up in a small town, find their victim, and shoot him dead.  The reader is left with the  intriguing question of why the victim doesn’t try to escape from his killers or at least plead for his life. So it would be more accurate to say that this film (like the later one) is inspired by Hemingway’s story in that it attempts to explain ...