Change Your Image
Gornzilla
Reviews
Never So Few (1959)
Hokey, but not campy enough.
Plenty of spoilers so be warned. The main point is, Steve McQueen stole every scene he was in.
It's more hokey and not nearly enough camp. I reckon in this, The Age of Internet, every Tom, Dick, and Harry off-the-street can recognize sloppy casting (hey, all Asians look alike!) and bad sets (Burma jungles look just like California forest).
I was watching Sinatra, with a beatnik beard, an Aussie hat, and his pet monkey, hang out with his best pal, an English Gentleman officer. A best pal always gets it, especially when they're a Fine English Gentleman with a Monocle (tm).
Frankie kicks his beautiful red-headed girl to the curb for Gina Lollobrigida, and punishes Gina with his acting. I thought he was great in "The Man with a Golden Arm" but he's no Elvis in this one. Take the Elvis comment however you want to.
Speaking of back monkeys, Frankie has a monkey on his back in this movie. Not the same kind of monkey as "Golden Arm", but this time he gets the monkey off his back. Well, the Japanese (fighting with American rifles and machine guns and driving American jeeps), kill the monkey. As Black Flag nearly said, "I've got a monkey on my back and it's not my imagination".
The director, John Sturges best known for "The Great Escape", did us a favor and Peter Lawford wasn't Frankies best pal -- no hokey English accent. Oh, and word is, Sammy Davis, Jr was set to be in the movie. He had the gall to say he was a better singer than Sinatra. Sinatra kicked him to the curb, too.
Dean Jones, the Shaggy DA, fights Charles Bronson -- who's playing a Navajo. I ask, "How come George Takei isn't playing a Burmese soldier? Oh, maybe this was made when Star Trek was on the air".
Then Takei makes his appearance! This movie came out in 1959. Totally my mistake because Sinatra looked a little haggard.
Whenever any of the Japanese, Italian, Chinese actors playing the Kachin natives of Burma were shot, they'd apologize to Sinatra for dying in their "me so horny, me love you long time" dialect.
Eventually Frankie sneaks across the Burmese border, over to China. There were renegade Chinese soldiers, who slaughtered 34 American soldiers in Burma. This made Frankie mad. Very mad. So he takes the passed-out-drunk Chinese platoon hostage without firing a shot.
The only shots fired are Frankie killing officers. He realizes he's in trouble for doing this, plus crossing a border, so he sends Steve McQueen out to slaughter the still drunk unarmed prisoners. Steve's glad to do it. It's no Mai Lai Massacre but it still brings in a "tsk tsk" from American GI Management and Frankie and Gina run off to be married, or as he puts it, "keep you pregnant, barefoot and in the kitchen". Really.
Iron Horsemen (1994)
Surreal English subtitled version
I bought the movie for a dollar in the Mission area of San Francisco without knowing what it was about except it was a biker movie. I picked up half a dozen 1960s biker movies, since the DVDs were just a buck, and watched this after Angels: Hard as They Come.
Jim Jarmusch looked really familiar. Is that Nick Cave? When was this made? It wasn't until after I watched it that I looked it up on IMDb and found out it wasn't made in the 1960s.
This is a crazy weird movie with no background sound at all. I love Davie Allen and the Arrows, but watching a movie where bands "play" but there's no sound is very interesting. By no background sound, I mean nothing. Not the sound of motorcycles or anything. Just dialogue, then it's like the mic is cut off. It was very neat when some rockers (riding a cafe Norton, a Hinckley Triumph and something else) put a song on the jukebox to look tough before wailing the tar out of the main guy, but no music comes out.
Very surreal. I thought about trying to hunt down the European version to see it in full sound and to figure out what languages they speak, but I'll stick with the surreal.