Golden Swallow ( 1968 )
Director King Hu may have left Shaw Brothers, but Cheng Pei Pei was still under contract to the studio, which was all they needed for a sequel to Come Drink With Me. Directing duties went to up and coming director Chang Cheh. The Dragon Dynasty box for this film claims it was Chang Cheh's first big success, ignoring that One Armed Swordsman came out a year earlier. You would think that this time with Golden Swallow being the title character that she would finally be the hero of the film. Well, look who directed the film and think again.
The film us mostly about a character called played by Jimmy Wang Yu called Silver Roc. Just a year earlier Yu became a superstar due to the success of One Armed Swordsman, and would remain the studio's biggest star until the day he broke his contract and left Shaw Brothers to legally make films for rival studios in Taiwan. The film opens with Golden Swallow being ambushed in a fight and felled by poison darts. Before the outlaws can kill her, another hero called Golden Whip ( Lo Lieh ) shows up and fends them off. Golden Whip brings Golden Swallow to his secluded shack in the woods to recover, which she does thanks to a time jump. Both become very close. One of Golden Whip's friends drops by for a visit, and during a picnic begins to talk about another hero called Silver Roc, an undefeatable and ruthless swordsman who has been killing villains. Golden Swallow wonders if Silver Roc is actually Little Roc, a fellow student from her martial arts school and former love intrest.
At this point the film cuts to Silver Roc, who easily obliterates a gang that has attempted to ambush him. The film then follows his character as he goes around obliterating criminal gangs, but deliberately leaving behind knives with Golden Swallow's insignia on them, framing her for the slaughters. Midway through the film a gang attacks Golden Swallow and Golden Whip, telling them that they are taking revenge for all the people Golden Swallow has killed. Somehow she figures out that Silver Roc must be framing her in order to get her attention. She says she will be going into town to investigate, but Golden Whip talks her out of it by telling her she is wanted by gangs for revenge and it isn't safe. That night Golden Swallow decides to sneak out and go to town anyway. Golden Whip decides to do the same, and ends up finding Golden Roc first. After a verbal argument, both men agree to a duel, the survivor claiming Golden Swallow. She finally shows up and attempts to talk the men out of the duel, but Silver Roc tells them he isn't done wiping out the criminal gangs, and after he gets rid of the leader that afternoon, would meet Golden Whip for the duel at dawn the next day. From this point on Golden Swallow is nothing more than a bystander. Even her attempt to stop the duel fails because she oversleeps. In the final fight between Silver Roc and the last of the criminal gangs taking vengeance for the death of their leader, Golden Swallow is nowhere to be found. Needless to say someone dies from the duel and decides that was the man she really loved while the other decides to leave her forever.
Chang Cheh typically ignored female characters in his films. The few he did have existed only to be killed so the hero would have more if a reason to hate the villain, or were the catalyst who got the antihero into a fight with a rival streetgang. He did have one or two strong women characters during his Venom Mob era, but in 1968 he wanted nothing to do with them. But while Golden Swallow ended up sidelined in her own film, it is still one of the better films from the early old school era, and definitely one of the must see films for all Jimmy Wang Yu fans.
Conan The Barbarian ( 1982 )
There has been some debate on if pulp novel hero Conan counts as a superhero. The character was mostly forgotten when Marvel Comics licensed the rights to the character, and for most of the 70s Conan was their best selling character. Those going to the first Schwarzenegger film were mostly fans of the comic books and assumed he was the first Marvel character to get his own movie. Actually, producer Dino De Laurentiis did a complete end run around Marvel and obtained the movie rights from the Robert E Howard estate. I was prepared not to count the Conan films as superhero films, but then Wikipedia added the 2011 reboot film to their list, and kept it there. So just in case, I got the Schwarzenegger trilogy ( including Red Sonja ), and the reboot.
I went to see Conan the Barbarian twice when it came out in theaters, but only actually saw it once. Me and my friends knew of Conan as a comic book character, and as such wanted to see it. But none of us were old enough to see an R rated film. So we had a plan. We would go to the local multiplex and buy tickets for Rocky III, but then walk into the theater showing Conan. Usually no one checked to see if you were walking into the correct theater at this particular multiplex. And if it turned out they were, then at least we bought tickets to another film we wanted to see. The plan began to fall apart on the way to the theater when one of my friends mention his older brother told him a woman's head gets chopped off in the beginning of the film. Then he kept trying to talk us all into seeing Rocky III instead. It eventually became apparent that he was afraid of seeing a woman's head being chopped off, and the closer we got to the theater, the more he was in a panic about it. When we reached the box office we flat out told him we were going to see Conan, and if he didn't want to then he could either go home, or we split up once inside the multiplex and he could watch Rocky III while we went to see Conan the Barbarian.
We thought everything was settled, until we were inside the Multiplex, and the friend started talking really loud in front of one of the roving ushers: "You guys bought tickets for Rocky, and are now going to sneak into see Conan, right!?" I mean, he practically told the Usher to his face. But somehow the usher didn't hear him, or didn't care, and kept walking away. So we continue walking towards the door to the Conan theater when the friend yelled at the top of his lungs, loud enough for everyone in the building to turn and look in our direction "YOU GUYS CAN'T SEE CONAN! YOU BOUGHT TICKETS TO SEE ROCKY! THAT'S WRONG! CONAN IS AN R RATED FILM!" At witch point someone in a red business suit we assumed must be the manager began walking in our direction while random ushers began circling around us while two of them walked right next to the Conan door and stood there with their arms crossed. So the rest of us kept walking as if we were planning to go into Rocky all along, right past the Conan door and into the packed Rocky theater. When we periodically looked back we saw the man in the red suit and an usher standing at the enterance door looking in. We watched Rocky III, and as we left the multiplex, every door to every R film suddenly had two ushers keeping guard and inspecting every ticket. He didn't just ruin it for us, he ruined it for every kid planning to sneak in to see an R film that day, and probably ruined it for the rest of the summer as well. Oh, and we never invited him to come with us to the movies again.
The coda to this story: we never attempted that multiplex trick again. There was a grindhouse theater in another part of town that didn't give a crap if you were under 18 and let anyone in to see R films. The only problem was they didn't get current films untill months after their release date. But I did finally get to see Conan the Barbarian there. And that scene my former friend was so worried about? You never actually see the head chopped off. You see the villain swing his sword in the woman's general direction, then the angle cuts to just the woman's torso in frame when something blurry passes the camera for a split second, then the body slumps sideways. You don't even see the head on the ground or a headless body. There was a lot of gory and violent stuff that followed, and you do see someone else beheaded at the end of the film. But the one scene that guy was so afraid to see was nothing.
The movie is your basic origin plot. A group of marauders lead by a warlord named Thulsa Doom ( James Earl Jones ) attack a village, killing all the adults, and enslaving all the children. One child is forced to turn a gigantic millstone with a group of adult slaves. Years go by and one by one the slaves die of exhaustion until only the kid is left. But thanks to years of pushing the millstone, he has grown up into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Someone buys Conan and forces him to become a gladiator. After years of fighting Conan's master unexpectedly sets him free for no reason. He soon befriends two thieves, one a girl he falls in love with. Together they rob a tower belonging to a cult. This impresses the king, who hires Conan and his friends to steal back his daughter, who has run away and joined the cult. Conan has his own reason for confronting the cult. It's leader is Thulsa Doom, the same man who killed his parents years earlier.
I could not remember if I liked or hated this film back when I saw it in the theater. By the time I did see it, I had already read the Marvel comic book adaption, so already knew the entire plot. I noticed when popping the disc into the DVD player that it was over two hours long. If I didn't like the film, or if it was another film that didn't age well, that extra half hour could end up being interminable. I do remember all those Conan rip offs that followed, like Beast Master, felt like they were nothing but padding.
Fortunately Conan doesn't seem to lag anywhere, even though it is a bit thin on plot. The action is very decent, for an 80s Hollywood film. Mind you, the action in Golden Swallow, which was also mostly sword fighting, was ten times more energetic. And that came from an early old school era film where Shaw Brothers was just beginning to learn how to stage fight scenes. But where the sword fighting in Conan may be slow and lethargic, director John Milius makes up for it with plenty of gore. This was probably the most blood spilled in an American action film since Sam Peckinpah stopped making Westerns. And there is also that great theme music from Basil Poledouris which makes a scene seem more action packed then it actually is. Conan the Barbarian is an entertaining film, although today's generation would have seen much better in any random episode of Game of Thrones. ( And yes, I am including that last episode. )
Flying Deuces ( 1939 )
It would have been awkward if I had been hosting a L&H LoC the same time I reviewed this. Believe me, it is pure coincidence this movie is in my viewing que as I ordered it a month before the poll. I first began buying L&H films back in the late 80s when Nostalgia Merchant released 9 volumes of their shorts on VHS. I bought their other films whenever they got a VHS release, and that included Flying Deucse. Since the film was public domain, a lot of companies were releasing it, but all from the same low quality print. I paid $3 for a copy from Goodtimes Home Video. The boxes artwork sucked, but it was cheap for a film I could have easily videotaped off of PBS for free.
I began buying L&H films on Laserdisc in the mid 90s, mostly because at first Image was only releasing their silent films on that format. Then Laserdisc was replaced with DVD. I originally had a strict "no double dipping" policy. If I already had the movie on VHS or Laserdisc then I wouldn't get it on DVD because I already owned it. But then Image made that impopssibl with the DVD releases of the silent films, each volume having both previous unreleased films, and films already released on Laserdisc. Eventually I abandoned the no double dipping policy because the DVD releases were sourced from far better quality prints than the previous VHS releases. As of a few months ago I had every one of their films on DVD, except for the two lost films and the two public domain films. Why upgrade from VHS on A-toll K and Flying Deuces if they were just being sourced from the previous VHS releases, and probably looked worse than the Goodtimes release?
There is no financial incentive to remaster or restore a public domain film. Why go through all that expense when any rival company can legally source your release and release their own "remaster" of it? And yet a few years back Kino released what was called a "deluxe collectors edition" of the film. It was sourced from an European release of the film sourced from first generation prints. Unfortunately it was a conversion from PAL, and the conversion somehow sped up the film. Perhaps not enough to be noticable unless you noticed the shorter run time on the clock, but enough for a lot of buyers to give the release one star for the flaw. So I decided to wait and see if Kino fixed the problem. They didn't. Instead the disc went OOP.
Fortunately another first generation print was used for the first Blu-ray release of the film. It is supposed to be the best copy ever released on home video in North America, and had some decent extras. So my first L&H Blu-ray turns out to be one of their public domain films. The quality of the print is stunning. There was some evidence of possible dropped frames, especially in the opening credits. And in some scenes it did appear as if they switched back and fourth between two different prints. But otherwise this was the quality you wish all the L&H films were available in.
Okay, enough of that. What about the film itself? Film historians William K. Everson once assessed that Blockheads was Laurel and Hardy's last great film, with everything from that point on being inferior to the rest of their body of work. And no L&H fan has ever disputed this. Even the final two films made for Hal Roach were compromised by being paced to be released as Streamliners. ( B Feature films with a 40 minute running time. ) Both ended up being padded out to 60 minutes at the last minute. Then, of course, there were the FOX and MGM films everyone hates, and their last film which was made while Stan Laurel was very sick.
Flying Deuces comes off as the best of their final films. But it's still nowhere as good as most of their previous films. There are a few gags that are very funny. But much of the film isn't funny at all. Actually, it is a miracle that Stan was able to turn this into a decent enough comedy at all.
Hal Roach had leant L&H to another studio that was remaking a French film called The Aviators. The plot of which had two incompetent Frenchmen get into an airplane while drunk and take off, and once sobering up, realizing they had no idea how to fly. When they finally crash the plane they discovered they set an endurance record for longest flight and become national heroes. The American adaption was a wildly inappropriate script that split Laurel and Hardy up for most of it's running time, and had them doing mean-spirited gags. An emergency meeting was called with Stan and his gagmen ( Charles Rigers and Harry Langdon ) to completely gut the script and write a new one within a few weeks. The only thing kept from the original was L&H flying an airplane, and that it took place in the French Foreign Legion. This made it extra hard for the writers because L&H had already done a Foreign Legion comedy eight years earlier and now had to write a second film with the same premise, but with a different plot and gags. And with the shorter shooting schedule, L&H had far less time to develop improvised gags on the set as they had done in their previous films, or reshoot scenes that didn't work. They were also stuck with a director who insisted they stick to the script and do as few takes as possible.
But despite all of that, you do get a few decent laughs here and there. But not from the ending. For some reason Hollywood thought the idea of two comedians accidentally flying an airplane was hilarious. ( I can't tell you if the original French version was funny because I can't find a review on IMDb Rotten Tomatoes, or anywhere else on the internet. ) Just two years after this film Abbott and Costello made Keep Em Flying which also had them accidentally taking off in an airplane. And there are more examples of this. But every time, the flying scenes are neither funny nor thrilling. It's as if the script writers don't get that the various gags with the airplane are too dangerous to actually film, or that the studio would ever let one of their stars do airplane tricks. So everything ends up being unconvincingly back projected on a studio set with the occasional model plane shot for the near miss tricks. Unfortunately Flying Deuces builds up to this unfunny climax, and is only saved by a charming freak ending gag Stan tagged onto the ending of the film.
Topic: What was the last movie you watched? (Read 1765818 times)
