Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

I normally avoid finding out anything about a film I am going to watch.  So when I had finished this 1958 crime picture directed by Don Siegal I had a few unanswered questions.   Why were the San Francisco police detectives so dull?   Why was the SFPD shown in such a positive light that the film seemed like a promotional video?   Why the title when the only line-up was shoehorned in and was completely irrelevant to the plot? The answer to all these questions came courtesy (yet again) of Wikipedia. This film was a spinoff of a successful TV series, called 'The Lineup', so naturally the actors from the series get to play the same parts in the film (although that didn't happen in the case of 'Miami Vice'), and naturally there has to be a line-up. So anyway the first half-hour or so is fairly oh hum as we follow the dull detectives getting to grips with a plot whereby tourists from the Far East are unwittingly smuggling drugs into the US. Things only pick ...

The good news is that this film isn't quite as unwieldy as the title. It's a  re-edited version of the theatrical release version of ‘The Godfather Part III’, which I may or may not have seen, I really can't remember.  So I can't speak to the changes, but the consensus is that Coppola's edits  make for a tighter narrative (thank goodness). But of course he can't do anything about the film's two main problems: the presence of Sofia Coppola and the absence of Robert Duvall. Although Sofia's performance was savaged by the critics it is not her fault that the subplot of the romance between her character (Mary, Michael's daughter) and her cousin Vincent  (played by Andy Garcia) is so poorly written and dull.  If it could have been removed in its entirety we would have been spared several excruciating scenes. It would also have cut down the running time, which wouldn’t have gone amiss. On the subject of plots that don’t add a lot, I couldn’t raise much int...

By rights this star-studded epic should make for painful viewing - 146 minutes of white people congratulating themselves for overcoming adversity in order to create the paradise on earth that is modern day America. Slavery doesn't get a mention despite the Civil War featuring slam bang in the middle of the period covered, roughly the 1830s to the 1870s. And although it is acknowledged that the Native Americans might have just the teensy weeniest grounds for complaint, the view of the film, as voiced by one of the more unpleasant characters, seems to be that they were at fault for not learning to adapt. Three different directors contribute different sections of the film, but none of them manage to stamp any individual style on the material, so you don't notice the joins. But if you can put these issues, along with the rather bland voice-over commentary, to the back of your mind there are some pleasures to be had, and the commercial success of the film is not completely unwarrant...