Kick-Back Friday: December 2008 Archives
Zulu (1964), with a very blond and relatively young Michael Caine, depicts the lopsided battle between 139 British soldiers, some hospitalized, and roughly 4000 Zulu warriors at a South African mission station in 1879. The movie forecasts a bloody outcome for the British by opening with the Zulu victory over a much larger British force in the Battle of Islandlwana and by taking a respectful, almost documentary-like view of Zulu warrior culture.
Close attention to smart dialogue among the British infantrymen will compensate for the dramatically rough, often amateurish scenes of hand-to-hand combat.
The Dawn Patrol (1938) with the debonair trifecta of Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and David Niven. Not exactly holiday fare, but a remarkably advanced morality tale of an RFC division in France during WWI. All 3 actors give wide-ranging, yet frequently nuanced, performances (if that's not too oxymoronic)—even by today's standards.
Plus I could look at Basil's profile for hours.
Poster image from Wikipedia and reproduced under fair use law.
Another scenery-chewing western (but the good kind) from Anthony Mann: The Furies (1950). Walter Huston, in his last film, and Barbara Stanwyck are New Mexican ranchers T. C. and Vance Jeffords, possibly the most mutually vindictive father-daughter duo outside of Greek tragedy.
Blago wouldn't stand a chance against these two.
N.B. If you're trying to place the miscast Wendell Corey, Stanwyck's would-be fiance, he was the detective in Rear Window.
Classic noir doesn't get any more classic than Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), which pits wholesome detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) against snarly underboss Vince Stone (Lee Marvin).
Gloria Grahame, as Stone's girlfriend, becomes a none-too-subtle metaphor for organized crime when she encounters a pot of coffee.
