*SPOILER ALERT*
the Little Drummer Girl: (1984. dir: George Roy Hill) This is easily my favorite film from a le Carre story. The Oldman Tinker Tailor is a better film, almost perfect, in fact, but I love the Drummer Girl like you do a redheaded stepchild, the better for all its flaws. Most of the shortcomings lie within its time: the music (Dave Grusin), Diane Keaton's massive-shouldered, big-plasticked costumes and jewelry, not to mention her mullet, and the slow, schmaltzy scene transitions, all these things and more reek of the eighties. Keaton is miscast as a young theatre actress (too old, and with a truly appalling attempt at an English accent) but in the end carries a good role well enough to serve, with a few really wonderful scenes, including one when she tries and fails to go back to parlour-room comedy after living the life of a spy. As in the Deadly Affair, one of the best parts of this film is the glimpse it gives into English theatre, peopled by the likes of a young Bill Nighy.
I saw it in the cinema when it came out. It was the first I ever saw of Klaus Kinski, and, more importantly, Sami Frey, whose late-arriving double-role he performs with jaw-dropping skill and subtlety. If I were making a list of my favorite cinematic performances of all time, Frey would be on it for this.
the Law and Jake Wade: (1958. dir: John Sturges) It starts with a bang: a jailbreak for a cynically amusing sociopath played by Richard Widmark (an actor who lovingly drew up all the maps of cinematic Cynically Amusing Sociopath territory. My favorite line, drolly underplayed, after shooting two men: "Those guys sure picked the wrong time to walk in"), including an enigmatic relationship between him and his rescuer (Robert Taylor). The second unit long-shots are beautifully framed, but the rest of it descends quickly into that stagebound, pedestrian dialogue one has wearily come to expect from the TV-influenced Westerns of the fifties and early sixties. This movie sports all the symptoms of the spoilage: bad television writing in the middle, with one of the lesser characters given cheap dysfunctional familial motivations, little bonding between characters, and largely shot on soundstage in medium shot.
Only Widmark has any charisma, and the girl (Patricia Owens) is just annoying. DeForest Kelley plays one of the outlaw gang, and again I cite the general rule-of-thumb: if an oater's got an actor from Star Trek in it, it's probably not very good. I'm not saying one is a direct result of the other, just that you can usually count on a mysterious and synchronicitous correlation.
The hide-and-seek shootout in an old ghost-town at the end is nice, with no music or excess noise to distract. Here's the way to do it: watch the beginning and the end, and skip the hour and a half in between.
Royal Deceit: (1994. dir: Gabriel Axel) It's a Danish movie about the origins of the Hamlet story, which is a fine idea, except that it's done in English with British actors, and any time somebody takes one of Shakespeare's stories and rewrites it, let's face it, it's not going to be as good. What you get are actors like Helen Mirren and Christian Bale running around embodying Gertrude and her infamous son while NOT speaking Shakespeare, and the contrast is both jarring and disappointing. Also, it's badly directed (no doubt this poor fellow's first venture in directing in English, often a thing which leads to dismal failure), with poor timing, over-idealized scenery, and over-sentimental music, none of which helps.
This is one of the movies on Bale's road to stardom, but he's far better in Little Women from the same year.
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