Christopher Lee's urbane performance is a disappointment, lacking any sense of threat and inappropriately subdued.
His daughter is turned into some kind of vulgar geisha who seemed to have run away from a cheap girlie show.

The score by - unknown to me - Christopher Whelen is the familiar - and effective - combination of brass and percussions for small ensemble which had become the trademark of british horror scores at the time.

Where are Mirna Loy and Boris Karloff when you need them?

As for The Overlanders, it's in the public domain, so there are a few video companies with it I'm sure. I got my copy off of Ebay. A beautiful film in its own way. I mean, it's just about transporting cattle if you want to look at it that way, just as The Old Man and The Sea is just about catching a fish, but there's a lot more beauty and depth to the film if you can see beyond that.

This week--Another Hammer film, A Challenge for Robin Hood. Likeable cast, good score by Gary Hughes, nice locations, but no energy, all the action is poorly choreographed and the whole thing just drags and looks sloppy. A shame, because it had moments and could have worked. A big minus was the Merry Men, there just weren't any, no extras at all, it's like the same 5 men fight off an entire army in each confrontation. What is it with these Hammer films? They go for the right subjects, good solid pulp genres, but seem to lack the magic.

Scorpio, directed by Michael Winner, with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Paul Scofield. This was well done, very-detailed. It has the same feel as other films from the early 70s, like The Mechanic, in which there is a lot of betrayal. The film seems intentionally convoluted so you never quite know just what is completely going on or who is behind it all. Some of the action and motivation just doesn't make much sense, but even if there are plot holes and this isn't deliberate, the individual scenes that do work make up for those missing elements of narrative continuity. The film itself is about friendships meaning more than political loyalties or ideologies. That's the value that's missing from the newcomers in the Intelligence community which is why Lancaster wants out. It's also the reason why Delon hesitates to kill Lancaster and gets tearful at the moment when he can kill him. Lancaster, Delon, and Paul Scofield are all great in this. There are other actors in the film that I recognized from Star Trek episodes. Jerry Fielding's score has nice moments but also sounds like bad TV action music at times too. I've had the album since the 70s and somehow never caught up to the entire film it was related to until now (I've seen parts of it from time to time but on TV coming in at the middle and I never wanted to see it to the end that way so I'd turn it off--finally bought a video of it to see it start to finish).

The Twilight Zone: The Man in the Bottle. Basically, this is Bedazzled. A couple opens a genie bottle and gets 4 wishes and every time they wish for something there's a catch that invalidates the value of the wish and in the end they wind up back where they started. They get the "profit" of appreciating what little they have more than they did at the start. It's interesting, because the cinema and dreams are often about wish fulfillment (see Bruce Almighty for one recent example), that you get these pedantic lectures from time to time on how, since you can't really win the lotto and have what you want, that you should want what you have. As the Bible says, the Rich Man is the one happy with his lot. But somehow, I never come out of this lesson feeling better. The zen master can get by with a robe and bowl. I however still want new DVDs.

Screamers--Peter Weller and Jennifer Rubin in a sci-fi B-flick set on another planet. Since the dramatic situation is 'Will they survive?', the film keeps your interest, but since a few of the people aren't that likeable, there are moments when you stop caring about if they'll make it or not. Once the film takes on elements of The Thing, with the mutant weapons taking on human form, rather than boost the suspense, it seemed like old hat stuff. And some things just don't make sense, like why the mutant screamers still pretend to be human and don't kill the humans right off when they have a chance, that sort of thing. Still, the film must've had something going for it because I never turned it off and even stopped doing housework to sit down and pay attention to it. Which brings me to an odd sort of realization, that you can enjoy watching a film while watching it (or atleast get caught up in it)[maybe it's simply the act of watching anything at all that's the enjoyable thing], but then denounce the film once you're away from it, out of its spell, when you're at a place where you can think rationally about it with some discrimination. This doesn't mean the negative criticisms about it aren't true, however. But they did surprise me. I had a better time watching Screamers than the film justifies based on its content. And I had the strange experience of watching the film and saying 'that wasn't so bad', and then going to write about it and suddenly realizing, 'oh yes, it was that bad after all'. Huh?

Lou - I wonder if Miklos Rozsa wrote the TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE theme with lyrics in mind. Words would fit his melody quite nicely. Here's my Scottish version -

"A time to love
And a time to die
A time to love and a time to die
Och aye!"

And I must admit, I do have a soft spot for those non-horror Hammers like the one you mention. Yes, they were bland and... "bloodless" might be the appropriate term, but they were jolly romps in their day. Maybe their charm is a bit hard to see now.

Regarding SCORPIO, I liked that. I would disagree with your claim that the Fielding score sounded like "bad TV action music" however. To me it sounded like GOOD TV action music. Michael Winner took a lot of abuse in his time, but I loved the likes of THE MECHANIC, and even DEATH WISH when I was a nipper. They were really slickly done thrillers, cool as hell (hey, ain't that hot?), though we're not allowed to like them nowadays.

And I know what you mean about watching a film and enjoying it, then wondering afterwards why. That's the problem with analyzing things in order to justify our emotions. Sometimes it might be better not to think at all, and just "like", "love" and "hate", and to hell with the message board where words just distort feelings, even our own.

Directed by Stanley Kramer
Screenplay by Edna and Edward Anhalt, from the novel by Morton Thompson
Photography by Franz Planer
Music by George Antheil

Main Cast: Robert Mitchum, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Sinatra, Broderick Crawford, Gloria Grahame, Charles Bickford, Harry Morgan, Virginia Christine, Lee Marvin, Lon Chaney Jnr.

Young medical students Robert Mitchum (age 38), Frank Sinatra (40) and Lee Marvin (31) see life from different perspectives. The film centres around the Mitchum character, whose high ideals and work ethic make him callous to friends and family. Married to a woman he doesn't even find attractive (hardly surprising - it's Olivia de Havilland in a Queen of England wig), he dallies with repulsive gin-soaked Gloria Grahame before coming to his senses and accepting his frumpy wife and the existence of medical negligence as just the way things are. "Stop trying to live your life like a Greek tragedy", orders Brod Crawford.

NOT AS A STRANGER is solid entertainment, which doesn't mean to say it's great. I had some problems with the casting - the students are too old, of course, but I managed to overlook that, mainly because Mitchum is always fascinating to watch. I found the female parts harder to take - Olivia de Havilland is deliberately bland and unsexy as the loving wife with a heart of gold, but something's wrong somewhere when we don't feel anything for her predicament (pregnant and ignored). Even less convincing is when doc Mitchum starts to make frequent housecalls on boozy Gloria Grahame. I suppose she was meant to be the antithesis of the asexual goody-goody de Havilland wife, but she looks hideous here. Was that some kind of mouth-paralysis she had, or just the effects of the gin? Okay, maybe Mitchum would indeed have taken advantage of such an easy lay, but hearing the rest of the cast talk about her looking "so beautiful" was absurd.

Mmm, it does try, but the film failed to convey much to me, and although it has good stretches, it's a long haul. There's also a vaguely pompous tone to it all which rears its head now and again, but on the whole it's not bad, and it is strikingly photographed by Franz Planer.

Nazi code-breaker (as in breaker of Nazi codes, not that he was a Nazi)and composer of aeroplane engine concert pieces George Antheil provides the score. The main titles are excellent, a hard-edged dramatic cue which sounds more European than Hollywoodish. In fact, this opening reminded me of some of the melodically intriguing works of Gerard Schurmann. It's a great prelude which doesn't really fulfill its promise, the rest of the movie being bathed in over-the-top romanticism. It's also, I feel, overscored - some of those wonderfully shot close-ups of Mitchum's ambiguous expression would have carried a lot more weight if accompanied by silence.

I really liked Scorpio. Just because it was hard to know just what the truth of the situation was, that didn't mean it was a flawed film. Peckinpah, for one, would have relished Winner's approach to things, I'm certain. As for Fielding, after one of the greatest Main Titles he ever did, whether you call it good TV music or bad TV music, the majority of the score is lesser stuff, IMHO, sorry.

Yes, analyzing an experience might not be the best thing you can do with it. Language and thought may fail to communicate the complexity and totality of what you've experienced. Writing and thinking can lead you to take a logical position that excludes elements or tries to make experience fit a rational mode, all of which can water it down. Still, if one wants to communicate some gist of one's expeience to others, the act of communication insists on experience fitting with the form of the medium, which requires its solidification even if the result is incomplete. [Lost yet?] We could all keep to ourselves and never communicate an iota of what we go through. But even if communication simplifies or distorts experience, the translation process is all we currently have to use to transmit knowledge. I for one am not a great writer because I find it impossible to articulate emotions into language that reflects them. I do better describing thoughts and exterior reality, but even there there is so much that gets lost. Still, even though there is so much text, more words than there are drops of water in the oceans or grains of sand on every beach, and the last thing we need is more fumbling words to read, I still think we should try to use language to communicate. What happened to me with Screamers was that I experienced watching the film in one level of consciousness and in reflecting on the film for writing about it, came into contact with what was unconscious to me before the act of thinking and writing about it. What was unconscious differed a bit from my intital experience--the surprise factor--but was still a part of my experience. It came to the fore, was honest, and couldn't be discounted. Still, I had a similar conversation on the board with someone about how much analysis and awareness one should bring to watching movies. Like you Graham, I said that too much could spoil the experience, be a killjoy, was nitpicking. But, perhaps there's no getting around it, what you try to tune out for the sake of fun (like the contents of the hot dog you want to enjoy eating), simply will not be repressed and returns to you in some manner or epiphany. Or maybe you wake up feeling a little down the next day for no reason you can figure out. And in this respect, maybe it's good to discover and communicate that Screamers is full of holes, because that purges the poison of it out of your brain so that it doesn't return to you in some other form. If writing can help with that purgation process, than even if it is incomplete or can surprise you with an alternate driving direction, then maybe it's no killjoy after all.

Shear, who belonged to an age when to be a great TV director really meant something, made this pilot in the wake of the very good Across 110th Street - hence the casting of Antonio Fargas.

He seemed to have a developped a particular taste for violence, odd characters and details, which finds its way here.

The opening is quite chilling: two characters exchange banters about "Red River" before revealing themselves to be hit men who cold-bloodedly murder a young couple of lovers frolicking in a car.

Shear's talent is much on display in the finale: a terrific and suspenseful chase up and down the stairs of a seedy hotel, concluded with a shockingly brutal shoot-out in a parking lot - great editing and camera work.

The overall tone is darker, and grimmer than in the subsequent series and the proceedings are tinged with the inclusion of unusual touches in many scenes.

Lalo Schifrin's score is sparse, building-up to the one and only full developpement of his exciting main theme during the final action scene.

Directed by Alexander Hall
Screenplay by Seton I. Miller and Sidney Buchman, from the play by Harry Segall
Photography by Joseph Walker
Music by Frederick Hollander

Main Cast: Robert Montgomery, Claude Rains, Evelyn Keyes, Rita Johnson, James Gleason, Edward Everett Horton

A prize-fighter gets prematurely whisked off to heaven, and must find other bodies to inhabit (his own having been cremated), with ensuing complications.

This is perhaps the best remembered of the slew of light, heavenly fantasy movies from the 40s, but I found it a piffling whimsy today. It's the type of thing THE TWILIGHT ZONE would have done (and probably did) in half an hour, where, in the race to get to the moral, the mechanics of the plot stick out a mile. Very evident also are the stage origins, where the tiresomely snowballing complications are accomanied by an overall feel of "exit stage left".

Plotwise, it's also kind of funny how Claude Rains is on hand to hammer home the point that "you can't change destiny" yet is continually helping to do just that. Performances range from the low-voltage (Montgomery and Rains, the latter very gay- haired and so laid back he's almost dead - AH!), to the gratingly over-the-top (baldy grandad-headed James Gleason; the policemen - "Doh - I'm warnin' you buddy!").

So, I was left a bit unfulfilled, but MAYBE THAT'S JUST BECAUSE I'VE ANALYZED A PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE ENTERTAINMENT INTO DULLNESS, AND THE FEELING OF UNFULFILLMENT CAME FROM MY NOT HAVING HAD A BIG BREAKFAST THAT DAY, PLUS THE FACT I'M A MISERABLE OLD SOD.

Frederick Hollander's music is very much in the LAURA mold, though perhaps THIS was the actual mold, because David Raksin's LAURA was still three years in the future back then, and maybe Zzzzz mibbe zzz who knows zzzz mise en scene zzzzzzz Alexander Hall Zzzzz...