The back lots of Hollywood studios have been worn smooth over the years by countless posses, but the landscape of the Dollars looks barren and deserted. These are new Old Hills.
And they are populated by cheap Italian extras, apparently chosen because of their appearance rather than their acting ability, if any. All three movies are filled with close-ups of memorable faces, and these are not Hollywood extras with stuck-on whiskers but Italian peasants who have worked in the sun all their lives and will go back to work tomorrow. Most of them -- like the legless beggar or the witnesses at the hangings -- populate scenes only a few minutes in length.
Yet they supply atmosphere, like those strange people who hover in the shadows of Dickens novels, and when the beggar crawls into the bar and says, "Hand me down a whisky," that is the kind of macabre detail unthinkable in Hollywood. But the plot hardly matters, because the method of director Sergio Leone is to create a series of short, self-contained scenes. There are some good ones, as when Wallach finds a wagon of dying and dead men in the desert or when two men hire Van Cleef to kill each other, and he does.
There is a fine scene in which Leone's style seems to follow Hitchcock's. Eastwood is shown in his hotel room, taking apart his pistol to clean it. Horse-drawn cannons are being pulled down the street. Their rumble covers the clink of the spurs of three hired killers, coming upstairs to Eastwood's room. Leone cuts back and forth: the spurs, the cannons, Eastwood's pistol being put back together. Then he releases the suspense with split-second timing.
But zombies themselves are not interesting, because all they do is stagger and moan. As I observed in my review of the first film, "they walk with the lurching shuffle of a drunk trying to skate through urped Slushees to the men's room.
There is nothing wrong with the title "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" that renaming it "Ballistic" would not have solved. Strange that they would choose such an ungainly title when, in fact, the movie is not about Ecks versus Sever but about Ecks and Sever working together against a common enemy -- although Ecks, Sever and the audience take a long time to figure that out.
Hiring Travolta and Whitaker was a waste of money, since we can't recognize them behind pounds of matted hair and gnarly makeup. Their costumes look like they were purchased from the Goodwill store on the planet Tatooine. Travolta can be charming, funny, touching and brave in his best roles; why disguise him as a smelly alien creep? The Psychlos can fly between galaxies, but look at their nails: Their civilization has mastered the hyperdrive but not the manicure.
And "Tiffany! To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream.
It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. The film version imagines all of the events leading up to the adultery, photographed in the style of those "Playboy's Fantasies" videos. It adds action: Indians, deadly fights, burning buildings, even the old trick where the condemned on the scaffold are saved by a violent interruption.
And it converts the Rev. Dimmesdale from a scoundrel into a romantic and a weakling, perhaps because the times are not right for a movie about a fundamentalist hypocrite. It also gives us a red bird, which seems to represent the devil, and a shapely slave girl, who seems to represent the filmmakers' desire to introduce voyeurism into the big sex scenes. It's in a category by itself.
The director Adrian Lynn , of the much better " Foxes " and his collaborators race crazily down the aisles, grabbing a piece of " Saturday Night Fever ," a slice of "Urban Cowboy," a quart of "Marty" and a 2-pound box of "Archie Bunker's Place. There is an Irishman named Muldoon, a doubting journalist, a Negro, a little refugee kid with a pet dog, a hard-bitten veteran and the rest of the stock characters who fight every war for us.
Everybody is there except the Jewish kid from the Bronx and the guy named Ole with a Swedish accent. A case can be made for the movie, but it would involve transforming the experience of viewing the film which is excruciatingly boring into something more interesting, a fable about life and death. Just as a bad novel can be made into a good movie, so can a boring movie be made into a fascinating movie review. The screenplay is so murky, indeed, that I was never sure whether the Kids hated the Hitler Youth lads because they were Nazis, or simply because they didn't swing.
At a time when civilization was crashing down around their ears and Hitler was planning the Holocaust, it doesn't make them particularly noble that they'd rather listen to big bands than enlist in the military.
Who wouldn't? Like the Rocky movies, "Staying Alive" ends with a big, visually explosive climax. It is so ludicrous it has to be seen to be believed. It's opening night on Broadway: Tony Manero not only dances like a hero, he survives a production number of fire, ice, smoke, flashing lights and laser beams, throws in an improvised solo -- and ends triumphantly by holding Finola Hughes above his head with one arm, like a quarry he has tracked and killed.
The musical he is allegedly starring in is something called "Satan's Alley," but it's so laughably gauche it should have been called "Springtime for Tony. It's a mess. Travolta's big dance number looks like a high-tech TV auto commercial that got sick to its stomach. Elvis looks about the same as he always has, with his chubby face, petulant scowl and absolutely characterless features. Here is one guy the wax museums will have no trouble getting right. He sings a lot, but I won't go into that.
What I will say, however is that after two dozen movies he should have learned to talk by now. Typists will enjoy the typing scenes, in which she makes typing errors, causing her to throw away countless copies of Page 1, and then has the whole manuscript typed in no time.
This is the way typing is thought about by people who always use yellow legal pads themselves. There are other moments of incredible inaccuracy. They almost outnumber the moments of dreadful inactivity. For what seems like hours, the three heroes sightsee at Niagara Falls while a lousy pop group sings dreary, square songs.
Our attention is finally reduced to the lowest common denominator: Will anyone ever, ever make it with Jackie? It is dubbed into English instead of subtitled. It is wide screen. It has a pretty girl in it. Her name is Daniele Gaubert. Whoever painted that big sign in front of the theater has an accurate critical sense.
The sign says: "See Daniele Gaubert presented in the nude Let's face it. Going into this film knowing what we've heard about it, we're anticipating the scenes in which the two kids discover the joys of sex. This is a prurient motive on our part, and we're maybe a little ashamed of it, but our shame turns to impatience as Kleiser intercuts countless shots of the birds and the bees every third shot in this movie seems to be showing a parrot's reaction to something.
There are probably no or year-olds in the entire world like these two; they seem to have been created specifically for the entertainment of subscribers to Teenage Nudist. The archness of their "innocence" toward sex is, finally, just plain dirty. And the worst thing is that the movie seems to like it that way. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care.
It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests. The makers of "Beyond and Back" were also responsible, if memory serves, for another film called "In Search of Noah's Ark. At the end of that one they were still searching for Noah's Ark -- never found it.
At the end of "Beyond and Back" we're back, all right -- but were we beyond? Columbus encounters friendly Indians, of which one -- the chief's daughter -- is positioned, bare-breasted, in the center of every composition. I believe the chief's daughter is chosen by cup size. Columbus sails back to Europe and the story is over. Another Columbus movie is promised us this fall. It cannot be worse than this.
I especially look forward to the chief's daughter. What about the story here? It has to be seen to be believed -- something I do not advise.
There's all kinds of murky plot debris involving nasal spray with cocaine in it, ghosts from the past, bizarre sex, and lots of nudity. We are asked to believe that Madonna lives on a luxury houseboat, where she parades in front of the windows naked at all hours, yet somehow doesn't attract a crowd, not even of appreciative lobstermen.
Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. The long shot has become a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to us. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.
There is a moment, for example, when men do not notice a vast encampment of the Union Army until they stumble upon it. And a moment in a cemetery when a man materializes out of thin air even though he should have been visible for a mile. And the way men walk down a street in full view and nobody is able to shoot them, maybe because they are not in the same frame with them.
Leone cares not at all about the practical or the plausible, and builds his great film on the rubbish of Western movie cliches, using style to elevate dreck into art. When the movie opened in America in late , not long after its predecessors "A Fistful of Dollars" and " For a Few Dollars More " , audiences knew they liked it, but did they know why? I saw it sitting in the front row of the balcony of the Oriental Theatre, whose vast wide screen was ideal for Leone's operatic compositions.
I responded strongly, but had been a movie critic less than a year, and did not always have the wisdom to value instinct over prudence. Looking up my old review, I see I described a four-star movie but only gave it three stars, perhaps because it was a "spaghetti Western" and so could not be art. There was even a pathetic attempt to make the films seem more American; I learn from the critic Glenn Erickson that Leone was credited as "Bob Robertson" in the early prints of "Fistful," and composer Ennio Morricone , whose lonely, mournful scores are inseparable from the films, was "Dan Savio.
Perhaps it is the subtly foreign flavor of the spaghetti trilogy, and especially the masterpiece "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," that suggests the films come from a different universe than traditional Westerns. Instead of tame Hollywood extras from central casting, we get locals who must have been hired near the Spanish locations--men who look long-weathered by work and the sun.
Consider the legless beggar who uses his arms to propel himself into a saloon, shouting, "Hand me down a whiskey! John Ford made Monument Valley the home turf of his Western characters, and he made great films there, but there is something new and strange about Leone's menacing Spanish vistas. We haven't seen these deserts before. John Wayne has never been here. Leone's stories are a heightened dream in which everything is bigger, starker, more brutal, more dramatic, than life. Leone tells the story more with pictures than words.
Examine the masterful scene in the cemetery. A fortune in gold is said to be buried in one of the graves, and three men have assembled, all hoping to get it. Each man points a pistol at the other. If one shoots, they all shoot, and all die. Unless two decide to shoot the third man before he can shoot either one of them.
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