The Screengrab : telly savalas

The Best & Worst Get Rich Quick Schemes In Cinema History (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:00:00 GMT

KELLY’S HEROES (1970)

Like Three Kings (which it no doubt inspired), Kelly’s Heroes drops a heist flick into the middle of a war movie and winds up making some interesting points about free will versus obedience in a military setting where the grunts on the ground sometimes have more in common with the low-level enemy soldiers they’re fighting than they do with their high-ranking, high-living superiors. “You and us, we’re just soldiers, right?” Telly Savalas’ Master Sergeant “Big Joe” says to a German tank commander at one point. “We don’t even know what this war’s all about. All we do is we fight and we die and for what? We don’t get anything out of it.” True, the sentiment’s a little sketchy when the conflict in question is “The Good War” and the enemy solider in question is wearing Nazi S.S. stripes...but in the midst of the far less good Vietnam War, director Brian G. Hutton’s celebration of enlightened self-interest reached out to peaceniks and free market capitalists alike, courting both groups with a truly bizarre combination of actors including Savalas, Clint Eastwood, Caroll O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, Harry Dean Stanton and Don Rickles. Sure, the movie’s pretty good...but I’m guessing it’s nowhere near as entertaining as the wrap party must have been. (AO)

USED CARS (1980)

This rowdy, ingenious comedy with the iconic title is like the history of con game farce impacted into a single, shiny object. It's about a war that breaks out between two rival car lots run by a pair of brothers (both played by Jack Warden), and it consists of one bold act of one-upmanship after another, with most of the schemes tinged with personal maliciousness. The nicer of the two Jack Wardens checks out early after his meaner number hires a stunt driver to take him on a test ride so scary that it induces a fatal coronary in the old duffer; his second-in-command, Kurt Russell, takes charge and prevents his nemesis from inheriting the lot by installing the boss' corpse behind the wheel of an old jalopy and burying it on the property. The movie's high point of brash invention comes when Russell and his team hire a couple of underground mechanical wizards (Michael McKean and David L. Lander, then joined at the hip as TV's Lenny and Squiggy) to jack into a televised presidential address so that they can cut into it with a live commercial, filmed on their rival's lot. (PN)

EATING RAOUL (1982)

Cult director Paul Bartel had his biggest indie hit with this homemade black comedy, in which he and the Amazonian Mary Woronov play an uptight, asexual married couple -- Paul and Mary Bland -- who accidentally murder a "swinger" (Garry Goodrow) who has invaded their home and tried to put the greasy moves on Mary. After cleaning out his pockets and coming to the conclusion -- which the movie seems to support -- that these polyester-clad degenerates will never be missed, the Blands adapt their discovery to an assembly line, putting ads in "swinger" papers to attract perverts who Paul dispatches with a konk to the head from his skillet. It adds something to the charm of the whole enterprise that the movie itself was a get-rich-quick scheme, which Bartel filmed in spurts over the course of several months, gathering cast and crew whenever he had enough money to proceed. Funding for the planned sequel, Bland Ambition, fell through, but the movie did inspire a comic book adaptation by underground legend Kim Deitch, as well as a later stage adaptation. Bartel and Woronov also revived their characters in a cameo for the 1986 horror movie Chopping Mall, for no clear reason except that they must have been in the area and the director offered them pie. (PN)

NIGHT SHIFT (1982)

This early Ron Howard film benefits immeasurably from Michael Keaton's performance, in his feature film debut, as a morgue attendant who persuades his rabbity supervisor (Henry Winkler) to turn the premises into the center of operations for a prostitution ring. This idea has detectable flaws, but they don't seem to matter much because of the enthusiasm with which Keaton embraces his brilliant concept and allows -- no, encourages -- it to take over and remake his life. His white boy with a taste for the pimp style now actually looks kind of prescient. And the fact that actual pimps made no serious attempt to adopt his euphemism for the profession, "love broker", make one weep for the lack of imagination of the human race. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Salutes: The Best & Worst James Bond Films of All Time! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

4. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969)

Okay, stop laughing. Yes, we realize this is the one with George Lazenby. But have you actually watched this lately? It holds up a whole hell of a lot better than most Bond movies, including some of Connery’s classics. But while Lazenby doesn’t have the same 007 magic as Connery did, fortunately the movie realizes this and makes it work to its advantage. By the time he hung up the tux for the first time, Connery was beginning to look a little too superhuman, so OHMSS begins with the new Bond getting a serious beatdown and quipping, “this never would’ve happened to the other guy.” From there, the movie gets really interesting, as the more vulnerable 007 is sent on one of the character’s best-written adventures to date, leading him to a remote Alpine clinic that could have been inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain if not for the bevy of nubile patients found therein. Likewise, the film contains its share of spectacular stunts, with special mention going to an impressive ski chase. But while Bond’s lustiness and flair for action are fully intact, OHMSS sees him do something he hadn’t done onscreen before -- fall in love. But then, with the object of his affections played by Diana Rigg, who could blame him? This revelation of Bond’s romantic side makes this installment more human than most, giving its hero a greater emotional stake in his mission, capped by a shocker of an ending that the series has yet to top. It’s tempting to wonder whether the film would’ve worked even better with Connery, but no matter -- even with a former Australian underwear model, it’s still bloody great.

3. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

For a long time, From Russia with Love – the second 007 movie – was considered the best. It later fell into a long battle with Goldfinger, and nowadays it’s often surpassed even for second place by some critics. It’s hard to see why: From Russia with Love is a roaring, energetic success from first frame to last. It cranks up everything from the first movie – the action scenes are wilder, the sexy scenes are sexier, the dialogue is wittier, and most of all the villains are top-shelf foes worthy of Bond. The opening scene is a killer, a fake-out that still packs a punch even after you know what’s coming, and it introduces all of the bad guys that make From Russia so juicy: the chess grandmaster Alexi Kronsteen, who hatches the movie’s plot; the vicious torturer Rosa Klebb (played by opera singer Lotte Lenya, slumming divinely); the brutal defector/assassin Red Grant, played by a stone-faced Robert Shaw; and, as the bait, Tatiana Romanova – played by Daniela Bianchi, one of the most gorgeous Bond girls. There’s also the usual dynamite set-pieces (including a raucous fight at a gypsy camp) and memorable weapons (Klebb’s poisoned shoe-blades), and one of the most enjoyable endings of any Bond movie. And it was JFK’s favorite!

2. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)

This begins with a terrific sequence showing Bond on the warpath, tracking down Blofeld so that he can pay him back for having killed Tracy (Diana Rigg), who Bond wooed and wed in the previous installment, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It also marked Connery's okay-but-just-this-once return to the series after sitting out OHMSS, and he plays this pre-title section with the controlled fury of a man who just missed out on his chance to get paid nine figures to make out with Diana Rigg. This is also the movie that proved that, no matter how many gadgets and goils are in place, it matters who plays the lead role. In a lot of ways, Diamonds is subpar Bond: it was the first film in the series made without the participation of Peter R. Hunt, who as editor and second unit director was integral to the look and feel of the action sequences on the earlier films, and who left after taking over as director on OHMSS, and the car chases and beatings lack the fluid aesthetic charge they once had. (At some points, they rival the Las Vegas setting itself for sheer tackiness.) But Connery, at forty-one, was just hitting his stride as an actor after almost ten years as a movie star, and he endows Bond with an ironic awareness and some vulnerability that are beautiful to see. It's probably the best performance he, or anyone else, ever gave in the part.

1. GOLDFINGER (1964)

The third James Bond film is close to being a consensus pick as the favorite. It was the first one to be considered a blockbuster success, making back its then-hefty $3 million budget in record time, and it’s not hard to see why: it’s really the first 007 adventure that has every single element of Bond greatness in place. It begins with the unforgettable theme song, performed by Shirley Bassey; it features a memorable villain in Gert Fröbe’s meaty precious metals enthusiast Auric Goldfinger, and one of the best henchmen of all time in Harold Sakata’s Oddjob, whose razor-brimmed fedora set the tone for future gimmick weapons. It had a clever plot, a solid script, lots of great action set-pieces, and a memorable deathtrap for Sean Connery’s 007, who must bluff his way out of being castrated by an industrial laser. Honor Blackman, fresh off The Avengers, plays Pussy Galore, one of the few Bond girls who aren’t total pushovers, and there’s lots of fun action from M and Q, as well as the full introduction of Bond’s tricked-out Aston Martin. Why is Goldfinger the best? Simple: it’s the quintessential Bond movie, containing everything a Bond movie should have in perfect order.

HONORABLE MENTION:

And finally...three Bond films that were disqualified from Best and Worst consideration for being close but not exactly actual Bond films at all...

OK CONNERY (1967); FFOLKES (1980); THE TAILOR OF PANAMA (2001)

Any association with a role like James Bond can result in an actor being typecast, but sometimes it's up to the actor to decide what to do with that. By 1980, Roger Moore was all but hermetically sealed in the role of 007, so much so that his only way to take a paid vacation was to accept the lead in a lame action-adventure movie, ffolkes, that was marketed to theaters with an ad campaign that tried to sell it as a Bond movie in all but name. The funny thing is that Moore latched onto the movie as a chance to escape Bond; the title character, a nautical-rescue-mission specialist who is prevailed upon by the British government to prevent Anthony Perkins from blowing up an oil rig, is an "eccentric" brainiac more in the Sherlock Holmes mode of antisocial superheroes, with a full beard and a pathological distaste for the fairer sex. The film didn't get much play, but Moore is said to prefer it to any of his Bond films.

The Tailor of Panama, directed by John Boorman and based on a John le Carre novel, provided Pierce Brosnan with a more direct route to giving his most iconic role an extended middle finger. Brosnan plays a horny total cynic of a secret agent whose compulsive womanizing inspires his bosses to ship him off to Panama to get him out of their hair. Incapable of behaving myself, Brosnan hires a tailor (Geoffrey Rush) to slip him information about his powerful clients; Rush, who can't find out anything but needs the money Brosnan is offering him, begins cooking up wild tales that Brosnan, who couldn't care less if they were true, is happy to send back to the home office. Between the two of them, they almost create an international crisis that is narrowly averted when the moviemakers had their budget slashed.

The booby prize in the Almost-Bond Sweepstakes goes to a 1967 movie that is alternately known as OK Connery, Operation Kid Brother, and Operation Double 007 -- that last being the title under which it was shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Made at a time when Sean Connery was already inching away from the role that had made him a star, this semi-spoof stars Connery's non-actor brother Neil as the little brother of an unidentified master secret agent who is unavailable for an important assignment. For the benefit of those very slow to get the point, any point, producer Dario Sabatello hired Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell, the "M" and Miss Moneypenny of the regular Bond series, as well as Daniela Bianchi, of From Russia with Love, Adolfo Celi (who basically reprises his villainous role from Thunderball), and Anthony Dawson, who played a minor baddie in Dr. No and whose hands played the hands of Blofeld in a couple of later films. The role didn't led to much, though in 1984, Neil did contribute a cameo to a Hong Kong 007 spoof, directed by Tsui Hark, whose cast also included Richard ("Jaws") Kiel and Harold ("Oddjob") Sakata.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Joanna Lumley Remembers: When Edina Met James Bond

Phil Nugent — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

It turns out that Joanna Lumley has a peculiar habit of dropping in on long-running spy-adventure franchises at strange moments in their histories. She stood in for Diana Rigg/Honor Blackman/Linda Thorson in the mid-1970s TV series The New Avengers, a retread of the classic 1960s show that also featured an extra, young male cast member (Gareth Hunt) so that he could handle any chores that might tax Patrick McNee's delicate heart rate. And in 1969, when she was 22, she appeared in the first James Bond film not starring Sean Connery, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. For those of you who may have trouble keeping one movie's world-domination plot straight from another's, that's the one where Blofeld, played by Telly Savalas with his earlobes pinned back, takes over a clinic in the Swiss alps and "cures" a bunch of girls of their allergies by hypnosis. In the process, he also turns them into unwitting time-release bombs in a biological-terrorism scheme as part of his plot to force the world's powers to grant him amnesty for all his past crimes and the right to be addressed as "Comte Balthazar de Bleuchamp" by anyone who can get the words out with a straight face. Lumley played one of these girls. "I was sent to meet Harry Saltzman, the American who co-produced the Bond films with Cubby Broccoli, in South Audley Street," she recalls. "It was a very hot day. The lift had broken. He arrived in his Rolls-Royce, after lunch, and since his office was on the top floor, I had to follow him up the stairs. At the top, he was so out of breath he was almost speechless. He just managed to say, 'Ya have da part'. I said thank you, and went away again. I often wondered why he hadn’t told me in the lobby downstairs."

Lumley's role was not large; her character is called simply "The English Girl", and she only has a couple of lines, one of them being the immortal "Oh goody, egg nog on Christmas Eve, just like we have at home.” ("I said quietly that we don’t have an eggnog tradition in Britain, but it was an American film so I had to say the line anyway. I felt like a traitor.") She didn't even get to go to bed with Bond, which is just as well, since the actress who did had to deliver a breathless post-coital monologue on the bother of having an allegery to chickens when your family operates a chicken farm. (Has it never occurred to you, Elspeth dear, that your allergy is your body's way of telling you something? Damn it, you're a beautiful girl, now kick the dust of that chicken farm off your penny loafers and get out into the big wide world and enjoy life! Sorry, where was I?) Still, Lumley is proud to be associated with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, because "the Bond film aficionados put it in the top three ever made, if not at the very top." Just because Lumley knows some off-the-wall Bond aficionados does not make their judgement incorrect. On Her Majesty's has most of the elements of a superior Bond movie, including thrilling wintry chase scenes (the film was directed by Peter R. Hunt, whose whiplash action editing was an essential part of the first wave of Bond films), an unusually classy romantic soundtrack number performed by Louis Armstrong, and a top-flight supporting cast that includes Diana Rigg as the woman who would (briefly) be Mrs. Bond, Gabriele Ferzetti as her way-cool gangster dad (who gets to punch her out before delivering the line, "Hey, you spare-a da rod and you spoil-a da child!"), and Ilse Steppat as Blofeld's female-tank sidekick. If the movie is actually underrated a bit, it's because of the presence, or rather the lack of same, of George Lazenby, the colorless Australian male model who got to stand in for Connery while he was in the bathroom for four years. According to Lumley, there were also "grim garlic-related stories" of the difficulties between Rigg and Lazenby, and I'd love to know whether this is supposed to be a veiled accusation that one of the leads is a vampire or just an indirect way of hinting that somebody's breath was not ideally suited to the kissing scenes. There's also an adorable recollection of how producer "Cubby Broccoli would come on set and say 'Is everybody happy? Is anything going wrong?' He often had his little daughter with him, who used to talk during filming but no one was allowed to say 'shush'. That was Barbara Broccoli, who now runs the film franchise." My guess is that today she could strip and do interpretive dance just out of camera range and nobody would say shit, either.

Related Stories: The Top 007 James Bond Theme Songs

Summer of '78: "Capricorn One"

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Capricorn One

Release Date: June 2, 1978

Cast: Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Hal Holbrook, Sam Waterston, Karen Black, Telly Savalas, OJ Simpson

The Buzz: A conspiracy thriller with a dash of sci-fi intrigue.

Keywords: NASA, Astronaut, Fraud, Chase, Reporter, Scorpion, Helicopter Crash

The Plot: Three astronauts (Brolin, Waterston and The Juice) are onboard their spacecraft ready to launch the first manned mission to mars when a NASA suit rushes them out of the capsule and onto a waiting plane. When they arrive in Los Angeles and meet with NASA chief James Kelloway (Holbrook), they learn that the ship’s cheaply made life support system was deemed unsafe, and that their ship has left for Mars without them. Appealing to their patriotism – and when that fails, not-so-subtly threatening the lives of their families – Kelloway coerces them into participating in a hoax. The Mars landing is faked on a Hollywood soundstage, as is their return to Earth. (You can imagine how this would be a scandal on par with Milli Vanilli lip-synching on the Grammies.) When the ship splashes down, Kelloway announces that the heat shields have failed and all aboard have disintegrated. Figuring that they’ve been duped, the astronauts escape and split up, heading in three different directions. At this point, you will guess correctly that Brolin will be the lone survivor. (The black astronaut is, of course, the first to die, but since it’s OJ, it’s hard to get too worked up over it.) Meanwhile, reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould, doing a broader take on his Philip Marlowe from The Long Goodbye) is sniffing around the story and figuring that something isn’t quite right.

The Test of Time: I’m actually a little surprised there hasn’t been a remake of Capricorn One yet, and not surprised at all that a Google search of “capricorn one remake” turns up dozens of rumor sites. The urban legend that the moon landing was faked persists to this day (see the recent NASA documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, in which exasperated lunar module pilot Charlie Duke points out, “We went to the moon nine times. Why would we fake it nine times?”), and Mars is back in the headlines this very week. Granted, the most recent cycle of Mars movies (Red Planet, Mission to Mars, Ghosts of Mars) met with little support from critics or the box office, but Capricorn has a solid premise, even if the execution is half-baked. In the hands of sci-fi hack Peter Hyams (Outland, 2010), it’s a lumpy thriller with no real momentum and little suspense. Also, the ending SUCKS - it's one of those '70s freeze-frames that thinks its so profound and ambiguous, when really it's just denying us a well-deserved comeuppance for no good reason. It's not like they'd be messing with a classic, so I can easily picture a more sophisticated Capricorn One, in terms of both conspiracy and technology, from, say, Steven Soderbergh. Yes, I can see it now: George Clooney, Will Smith and Steve Carrell as the astronauts. Call me, Stevie! We'll do lunch!

Quotable Quote: “You know, when Apollo 17 landed on the moon, people were calling up the networks and bitching because reruns of I Love Lucy were cancelled. Reruns, for Christ's sake! I could understand if it was the new Lucy show. After all, what's a walk on the moon? But reruns?”

2008 Equivalent: Let’s see…conspiracies, outer space, an investigator who stumbles onto something big…it’s gotta be The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

Previously on "Summer of '78": Thank God It's Friday

Abby Mann, 1927 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Abby Mann has died at the age of 83. For many years there, Mann symbolized Serious, Hard-Hitting screenwriting on Moral Issues inspired by Contemporary Themes. Like his doppelganger, Paddy Chayefsky, Mann attracted attention for his work on such "golden age of television" shows as and Studio One., where his seriousness of intent and hard-hitting tone made it clear that he would be a natural collaborator for the director-producer Stanley Kramer. Kramer brought Mann into movies, where he won an Academy Award for his first screenplay, for 1961's Judgement at Nuremburg, and followed that up by adapting Katherine Anne Porter's novel Ship of Fools for Kramer. He also wrote A Child Is Waiting, produced by Kramer and directed by John Cassavettes; Vittorio De Sica's The Condemned of Altona; and the Frank Sinatra vehicle The Detective. By the end of the 1970s, his and Kramer's brand of speechifying topical melodrama was actually more in demand in TV than in movies, and Mann gravitated back to the small screen; he inadvertently created the hit cop show Kojak and made Telly Savalas a star by writing The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a 1971 TV-movie based on an actual case of police injustice, with Savalas's "Kojak" as the muckraking hero; in 1978, he had his sole fling as a director by filming his script for the 1978 miniseries King, starring Paul Winfield as the civil rights leader. That program stirred up controversy for speculating on a conspiracy behind King's assassination, much as his 1985 script for The Atlanta Child Murders was criticized for implying that the black man convicted for the crimes, Wayne Williams, was a patsy for a mysterious white killer, or killers. His last filmed scripts were for the HBO films Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995), and Whitewash: The Clarence Bradley Story.

Meryl Streep IS "Mamma Mia!" Deal with It!

Phil Nugent — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Mamma Mia!, the Broadway hit that is half-jukebox musical devoted to the hits of ABBA, half-unauthorized remake of the 1968 movie Buena Sera, Mrs. Campbell, is coming to movie screens thus year. Granted, it could be that some of you have only a limited interest in the circa-'76 Swedish singing sensations or the comedy stylings of Telly Savalas. But even if that's the case, a couple of things make this project kind of interesting. First, while you might assume that the creation of "the most successful musical on the planet" had its genesis in some producer feeding some Billboard charts, a couple of obscure IMDB pages, and the estimated cost of his new beach house into a computer and hitting "Puree", but it turns out that it's really a labor of love by a team of three women: producer Judy Craymer, writer Catherine Johnson, and director Phyllida Lloyd. Having worked together to create the stage show, they've since collaborated on the movie--with pretty much total creative control, since Craymer had the foresight to hang onto the film rights. Though Lloyd has extensive credits in the theater and directed a TV version of the opera Gloriana for the BBC in 2000, this will mark her feature film directing debut.

The other notable thing about the movie is that it stars Meryl Streep, who will make her movie musical debut tackling a part that was originated (in Buena Sera, Mrs. Campbell) by Gina Lollobrigida and performing the songs made famous by Benny, Bjorn, Anni-Frid, and Agnetha. Streep, who's done enough heavy lifting in her film career to build the pyramids, has been mixing it up with comedies (Defending Your Life, Adaptation) and even the occasional action flick (The River Wild) for a long time now, but she's still probably the classiest thing to happen to Abba since Lasse Hallstrom directed Abba: The Movie. Being very bad people, our first reaction to the news was to assume that Streep probably wanted to buy a small Caribbean country or maybe had a gambling problem. (Incidentally, I personally first learned that she was in Mamma Mia! when I went to the movies and saw her skipping about happily in the trailer. I can testify that this was definitely the best way to find out about it, assuming that you think the proper way to celebrate such news is to choke on a Milk Dud while spilling your Coke in your lap.)

But it turns out that Streep, too, is in this one for the love. According to Judy Craymer, "Our passion for Meryl and Meryl's passion for the show made it work. She saw the show on Broadway and wrote us a fan letter saying what a great time she'd had. And it all happened rather fast. We spoke to her agent, her agent spoke to her, and apparently she said: 'Mamma Mia!?? I AM Mamma Mia!?' " Streep's participation made it easier for the filmmakers to go after big game in fleshing out the supporting cast, which includes Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård. Praising Streep's work in the film, Lloyd says, "She finds a line into a character and the way she should be like nothing I've ever seen before, and everyone else just raises their game as a result." So however badly the rest of the movies this summer might stink, at least we can look forward to the prospect of seeing what Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard look like singing when they're Abba songs with their games raised.