PullmanPumpy2 Reviews

Charley Varrick (1973)

Matthau and Siegel at the top of their game......

[10/10 · 2 January 2007]

This is a wonderfully tight little caper movie, good in all respects. with a neat ending the film has led up to beautifully. One fancies Siegel made this in his sleep, so smooth is his craftmanship, his years in the trade all leading up to this minor masterclass in how to make a tight little caper movie. Matthau is as good as ever as the caustic, streetwise small-time robber on the run from the mob, and a great cast -- Baker, North, Vernon and Robinson -- dovetail in perfectly. I liked Sheree North as an ingenue in her early pictures, but having failed to find the stardom her studio built her up for -- another next Monroe ! --she aged into playing wonderfully blowsy women in a number of good films. This is certainly one of them.

The Tall T (1957)

Come On, It's Going To Be A Nice Day

[8/10 · 1 January 2007]

Said, unnecessarily harshly, to the poor leading lady at the very end of the "Tall T" as Randolph Scott,having killed the bad guys, drags her, whimpering, towards the horses Poor girl. Just married, she has been kidnapped, betrayed by her new husband,seen him killed, been almost raped, forced to cook for the kidnap gang, and watch as Scott picked them all off one by one and left them in a heap. Wouldn't you whimper in these circumstances ? But Scott is having none of it.

It's a brilliant closing line in another one of the Boetticher-Brown-Scott collaborations that so enlivened the western genre in the late fifties. Beautifully written -- as was my other particular favourite "Ride Lonesome" -- all the actors bounce off Scotts' granite-featured impeturbality beautifully (Richard Boone, as ever, deserves a special mention) and the film encompasses a lot of aspects of western life as well as tells its' story at a good lick.

The only minus point was the cowardly husbands' boot-lace moustache. You knew he was going to do the dirty on his wife the moment you saw him, the cad !

3:10 to Yuma (1957)

Ten-out-of-ten but for the ending

[9/10 · 1 January 2007]

One of the finest of fifties westerns, wonderfully clear B & W cinematography, excellent screenplay and characterisations, wonderful cast -- I never forgave Jack Lemmon for marrying Felicia Farr and taking her out of films -- and fine direction by Delmer 'slow swoop' Daves....

But I have never taken to the ending. Glenn Fords' outlaw is unrepentant to the last, and yet at the last he sacrifices himself for his stubborn captor Van Heflin. No. Another of those false 'happy' or 'redemptive' endings of the crime-must-not-pay school that marred a number of movies up to the sixties, See "The Killing" for another one.

Lesser Prophets (1997)

One of those video rentals that turns out to be surprisingly enjoyable

[6/10 · 25 December 2006]

I liked this, although it is far from perfect. It's an ensemble movie, three or four separate story lines that all come together in an ending that is totally wrong, but never mind. I liked Dicenzo and his two illegal bookie cronies, their operation looked real to me, and if John Turturo's character was a bit inconsistent -- one moment a moron, the next just a bit backward -- and if Jimmy Smits' participation (I like Smits and his starring position on the video cover was a selling point) was disappointingly brief, there are enough good things in this to keep it interesting. It's mix of 'real' violence and slapstick is another inconsistency, but there is enough in the dialogue and the performances - DiCenzo is particularly good -- to keep it watchable throughout.

Three Guns for Texas (1968)

Awful acting , silly plot, ridiculous action sequences............

[1/10 · 25 December 2006]

This western looks what it is, a TV programme elongated to make it even more repetitious and boring than it would have been on the small screen.I am not sure who was worse -- Neville Brand,pulling faces, all gruff knockabout stupid amiability, William Smith, like Brand a fine actor when playing 'tough' roles, here struggling to play a nice guy,Shelley Morrison, as the ludricously expressionless and monotonous Native American woman who leads an outlaw gang ( yeah, right) or her knockabout sidekick, forever taking pratfalls entirely unamusingly.

This also has a ridiculous gunfight in which our hero Texas Rnagers simply ignore the bullets and engage the baddies in fisticuffs -- why the baddies didn't just shoot them, I don't know, except they were knockabout fools too and killing people wouldn't have been in keeping in a film made by amateurs for juveniles.

I am being unfair in criticising this as an adult, but one can only take as one finds....and this was execrable....

Prototype (1983 TV Movie)

I saw the Levinson-Link involvement and feared the worst.........

[7/10 · 15 September 2006]

But I was quickly reassured. From the moment Christopher Plummer shows himself to be a genuinely irascible old man and not your typical 'hero', and David Morse as the android, in his elongated pants and wide-open baby-face, made their first appearances, I was held. With its' plot -- professor wants to keep his invention out of the hands of the military -- this is nothing new in the plot department but it is written with care, and the cast (including the wonderful Frances Steenhagen as Plummers' feisty wife) and a good director, David Greene, make the most of it. The ending is a stunner, both clever and touching. On my list as one of those films I was expecting nothing of and was delightfully surprised.

Identity (2003)

A slasher-movie by any other name....

[4/10 · 8 November 2005]

This film starts intriguingly as various people find themselves thrown together at a motel during a rainstorm. Interesting characters and the always charismatic John Cusack doing his thing. But then the killings start, character-development and relationships are set aside, and the film gradually goes gorily downhill to its' quite batty denouement and really ho-hum final 'shock' moment. But then I don't particularly like these sort of who's-doing-it films because I always get the feeling that it doesn't matter who is doing it, it is only a writers' contrivance. And this is more contrived than most, with the ludricous assumption that the State Governor would sit through a therapy session with a murderous lunatic the night before the mans' execution and then take the psychiatrists' word that the clearly demented man was now cured. Oh, come on, I thought -- and knew instantly how the film would end. Oh well. Cusack is always a pleasure -- and Amanda Peet, Ray Liotta and Jonn McGinley head an good cast....