brynner, schwarzenegger, belmondo

Catlow: (1971. dir: Sam Wanamaker) Two unnerving things about this Western: Yul Brynner is all smiley and happy-go-lucky, which is a nice change for him, but kind of creepy for the rest of us, and post-Spock Leonard Nimoy has a naked fight scene. It's funny how some actors do one thing extraordinarily well, and nothing else fires up right. Call them Idiots Savants, I guess. I'm talking about Nimoy, of course, who singlehandedly created one of the great archetypes of the modern age and has embodied him flawlessly for going on half a century now, but as far as I can tell has never enjoyed the least success in bringing another character to life. (OK, there's one: the sly Comanche in Tate. He has one five-minute scene, not even that long, and it's a brilliant scene, I bought the whole series on DVD just so I could watch the one scene repeatedly, but that's it. He made quite a career playing television Indians prior to Spock, both the noble stoic and the treacherous types, but Tate got the best of it.)

Richard Crenna has some fun here, too, but the women are uniformly dreadful and insultingly used.

Predator: (1987. dir: John McTiernan) Something falls out of the sky into a jungle on earth. Then a bunch of uberstuds (including two state governors: Schwarzenegger and Ventura, and, interestingly, Shane Black, who would go on to an illustrious career in directing) emerge from a helicopter under the watchful eye of E.G. Marshall (uberstud gris). There is the usual establishment of battle-cred through moronic banter, generally pointed towards accusing one another of homosexuality, apparently a source of endless amusement among American soldiers.

Merging two monster genres, the Arnold action-film and the sci-fi blockbuster, turned out to be a windfall for some lucky bastard in Hollywood. The result doesn't age well, but it's still interesting as a historical oddity.

Mississippi Mermaid: (1969. dir: Francois Truffaut) Cornell Woolrich is a spell-binding storyteller, and Waltz into Darkness had me biting my nails as I read it. So why is it impossible to film? My first disappointment was the execrable Banderas/Jolie Original Sin from 2001, utter dreck, and now this? Truffaut, Deneuve and Belmondo, and STILL no love? They never stick to the book, for one thing, these directors who think they can do Woolrich one better. This one has the added disadvantage of being about beautiful and disconnected French people, and who can conjure feelings for the likes of such? Toss in the stupid title, and you get no more than a pained grimace from me.

One lovely thing is that Truffaut allows the story to unfold without excess verbiage or exposition. For example, when the Belmondo character has tracked the object of his obsession down to her hotel, we are not told how. He is a man obsessed, and we buy it without asking how.

Other than that, I say read the book instead.