Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

In this action comedy Hutch (played by Bob Odenkirk) is on the face of it a real sad sack of a nobody. The state of his marriage to Becca is summed up by the rolled up sheet she has placed as a barrier between them in their bed. His job is a monotonous accounting-type gig with a small business owned by his father-in-law, who doesn’t hold him in high regard. But guess what? It turns out that back in the day Hutch was a formidable assassin working for the US government, until he tired of it and developed a yen for a conventional marriage and suburban lifestyle. When a couple of inept burglars tangle with Hutch the worm finally turns, and not before long he is beating up five young punks on a bus, in an enjoyable fist fight that is well choreographed and makes creative use of the available fixtures and fittings.   Best of all, Hutch doesn’t have it all his own way (after all, it is five against one) and comes out of it with a fair amount of bruising as well as a stab wound. ...

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther criticised this 1961 Western, Sam Peckinpah's directorial debut, for moving "at the pace of a hearse". Which is only as it should be given that the story centres on the transportation of a corpse, that of a young boy, who is shot dead accidentally during a shootout in the middle of town (an occupational hazard in those days, I guess). His mother Kit (played by Maureen O'Hara) arrived in the town a few years earlier, pregnant and without a husband.  Despite her claims that her husband had been killed, she's a single mum of dubious morals as far as the town is concerned, and so she's ostracised and has had to make a living in the music hall. Due to her treatment from the town she rejects the idea of a funeral for the boy there, and instead she's going to take him to be buried with his father.  There's one small problem: it means a journey through Apache country and none of the townsfolk feel like escorting her.  ...

I have to confess that I struggled to get through this 1966 comedy spy thriller, and my attention was increasingly going AWOL as it went on. It’s directed by Stanley Donen as the follow-up to his successful effort in the same genre in 1963, ‘Charade’.  That film is set in Paris, stars Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, as well as a strong supporting cast, and has an entertaining plot.  Donen, who is best known as a director of musicals, was able to take these ingredients and make them into a charming soufflé of a film. In the case of Arabesque the ingredients are less promising: Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, not much of a supporting cast, and a plot which most critics found confusing. The result for me was less a soufflé, more a rubbery omelette. Cary Grant turned the project down which suggests he knows a bad script when he sees it.  He may also have wondered whether he would have made a convincing professor of Egyptology (spoiler alert: he wouldn't).  Although Gregory...