So James Stewart didn't get one of his powerhouse films in his random selection then (Vertigo, Anatomy of a Murder). I wouldn't be too happy going into the semi-final of the FA Cup of Actors with Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, especially being up against Émilie Dequenne. But that's what he's been given so we better get on with it (even though it sounds like some kind of Chevy Chase film).
Banker Roger Hobbs (James Stewart) plans on taking his wife on a lovely holiday, just the two of them (kinky devil). She has other plans and he ends up on a month long holiday with his whole family. Roger is not too pleased. He turns things around by seeing it as a chance to get his family back together and get them to see the true importance of family. Good luck with that mate.
Everything about this film screams the sixties: the supporting cast, the oh-so-polite teenage dance, and the music by Henry Mancini. Not necessarily a bad thing, but this has the feel of an American sitcom from that period where everyone claps when someone enters the room. The comedy for the most part is smile worthy at best. Apart from one moment which had me rolling about laughing (it's a shame that no-one else will).
The scene in question is when Roger goes out on a bird watching trip with his son-in-law's prospective boss, Mr Turner (in a strange interview process, the boss man spends three days with the family on holiday to get a feel for their moral fibre). When Roger begins to tire, Turner picks him up (not literally) on his walking style. He demonstrates how to walk with the knees bent, keeping the head parallel to the ground in a walking version of the economy run. Roger does this walk for a fair while, which had me chuckling away no end. (I did say that no-one else will probably find this funny due to the vastly obscure nature of the 'economy run' reference.)
One worrying aspect of the film is the casting of Lauri Peters as Roger's daughter who is in her early teens. For starters, she was in her late teens when she made this, but far worse is the plasticky quality of her skin and the fact that she has to do this strange gurning smile (all as part of the script admittedly). She ends up looking like a deranged toothless auton.
One of my favourite sequences involves Roger taking his son on a boat trip and getting lost in the fog (you know I can't resist a good mist.) It adds a much needed slice of variety in the middle of the film and although everyone in the whole universe knows that they're going to be fine, it's still enough to be engaging.
But it's got James Stewart in it so it can't be all bad. He's got the amazing super power of being able to raise any film that he's in up to at least average. He does so here, yet sadly it's not enough to knock out the lovely Émilie Dequenne, who only managed 6/10 herself with her entry. 5/10 evlkeith If you like this you could also try: Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, Magic Town.
I'm not that keen on Westerns. Spaghetti Westerns, yes, but not your usual run of the mill Western. (Perhaps that's why this is my first review of one.) So when Broken Arrow came up as James Stewart's randomly selected entry for the FA Cup of Actors, I was skeptical and thought that maybe Jamel Debbouze was in with a chance of nicking this match.
James Stewart plays Tom Jeffords in his standard Mr Smith Goes to Washington style (and there's nothing wrong with that). In a twist on the average Cowboys and Indians film where the Indians are subjected to genocide by our heroes, Jeffords befriends his Native American chums on the basis that he's sick of all the scrapping, so he wants everyone to kiss and make up and generally get along with each other. Funnily enough, Cochise (Jeff Chandler), the leader of the Apaches, is suspicious of this outsider and his American buddies want to give him a good kicking for knocking about with untrustworthy savages. It doesn't help that he falls in love with Sonseeahray (Debra Paget).
Let's start off by getting rid of the obvious problem of the filmmakers using white actors made up to look like Native Americans. It was made in the unenlightened 1950s so we can forgive them this error. But let's face facts, we're better than that now: it would be completely offensive to peddle that kind of thing in current times, especially if you were a massive family film studio, like Disney perhaps.
The plot made for a welcome change and I found myself enjoying it despite my misgivings. The scenery is stunning on occasions and for once The Native Americans aren't portrayed as scalp pilfering psychos but as a mostly noble, honourable group of people. There are a few wrong 'uns but that's fair enough. The settlers meanwhile are generally big racists.
James Stewart is a consistently bankable fellow and his performance here is no exception. Obviously I haven't seen all of his films but I'm betting that they're all eminently watchable. Here though, he is matched by Chandler, perfectly cast (apart from the skin colour issue) as a strong leader who is willing to negotiate a peace treaty. Paget meanwhile looks a tad young to be Stewart's love interest. In fact, she was born in 1933, so she's only seventeen at most. All a bit dodgy.
In the final analysis this just pips Jamel's entry sending our plucky underdog out of the competition and despite Broken Arrow never setting the world on fire it is still an above average film deserving an above average... 6/10 evlkeith If you like this you could also try: Vertigo, Rear Window.
I thought James Stewart had fluffed it in his attempts to triumph in his first round FA Cup of Actors match against laughing boy, Gael Garcia Bernal. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is so saccharine sweet in the opening scenes that I thought I was in danger of redecorating my fine room with regurgitated Super Noodles. The children in particular are completely cringeworthy, almost making it unwatchable. Luckily things improve.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington tells the story of what happens if you take an ordinary bloke (James Stewart in one of his many 'everyman' roles) and make him a senator. (A similar idea was explored in Harold Lloyd's The Cat's Paw albeit with the added threat of beheadings.) Jefferson Smith is chosen by a group of corrupt politicians and businessmen led by Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) and Senator Joseph Paine (Claude Raines) who need someone naive to go along with them and vote as they do. They especially need him for putting through a bill for building a local dam that will provide a fair bit of work (and money) for Taylor's company. Smith has different ideas.
Being a Frank Capra film you can pretty much tell where it's going right from the off. Yet I couldn't help but getting carried along with Smith's plight. He's got a bit of a Naruto type personality in that even when the odds are completely stacked against him, he won't give up. The latter half of the film has him holding the floor of the senate for hour after hour to prove his point. The rules state that as long as he doesn't leave the room or sit down he can carry on speaking. Which he does. For a long time. The whole issue of toileting never comes up. Maybe he just has a sneaky little trickle like the woman in Threads.
The script is great and has moments of brightness followed by everything going wrong with Smith getting hammered by the Taylor political machine. (His goons go so far as to use their trucks to ram paperboys off the road. Not polite or particularly pleasant.) There's also time for a small portion of love story with Smith and his aide Saunders (Jean Arthur) who initially is in league with Senator Payne but - amazingly enough - gets won over by Smith's boyish charm.
Supposedly on its initial release it didn't go down too well with the Senate. They didn't like the fact that it made them all look like corrupt mouthpieces led by outside industries and vested interests. Erm, surely that's the definition of the word 'politician'?
James Stewart is perfectly cast in this role. Now I know he goes a bit creepy and obsessive in Vertigo, but from this performance it is hard to imagine him having a single corrupt bone in his body. My favourite moment has to be when he gets settled in for the long haul in the Senate, takes out a flask and sandwiches from his bag and proceeds to eat them as the Senators return to listen to his rather long speech. I chuckled.
So despite having a massively shaky start I was won over by this tale of one man going up against the might of politicians and big business. As relevant now as ever. 7/10 evlkeith (So that puts James Stewart through to the next round and Gael Garcia Bernal is out. Hooray! To say that I was gutted in the first minutes of this film, what with the prospect of having to watch another Gael Garcia effort, is an understatement. But quality shone through. Phew.) If you like this you could also try: Anatomy of a Murder, Mr Deeds goes to Town, You Can't Take It With You.
Everything is going swimmingly, apart from the fact that a plane piloted by Frank Towns (James Stewart) and co-piloted by Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) has hit a sand storm and both engines have stopped. The tension has been built up slowly to maximise the impact of the crash. But then we are treated to a bizarre Are You Being Served style credits sequence. The characters all get a beautiful mid-grimace freeze frame - just as they about to be smacked in the face by some hurtling loose luggage - accompanied by the actor's name. This completely kills any excitement but is pretty funny. Besides it's what happens after the crash that leaves them stranded in the desert, that is the source of the real drama.
In virtually all air crashes someone has to die and this is no exception. But lets take a closer look at a couple of people who bite the bullet. One of them is seen reading an adult specialist magazine in an earlier scene. The dirty little pervert has to die. As for the next villain, thoroughly deserving of his grizzly death, his crime was to play music of an ethnic nature. Good job Doccortex doesn't fly too often.
Another character refers to the aforementioned music in a slightly more racist way. In fact, he refers to most things in a slightly racist way. But it's only the one character who's a racist so it must just be part of his character, although he doesn't get any comeuppance or have a change of heart to complete a character arc. He's just a big racist. The film doesn't do itself any favours either by including a German plane designer, Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger), who is rather efficient at his job, to say the least. In its defence it was made in 1965. (Chorlton and the Wheelies was made in 1976 and is also pretty racist, so we'll give it a break.)
Let's get the last negative out of the way: Borgnine. Not the attractive Borg lady from Voyager but Ernest Borgnine (decide which is better using the handy photos below). Overacting is his speciality and his performance here is exemplary. But this isn't too much of a problem. (Watch the film to find out the reason why.)
Despite being fairly studio bound the heat of the desert and the danger of their predicament is all too apparent. One scene deals very intelligently with the obvious idea of walking back to civilisation. It's something that I'd probably think I'd give a go but this shows just how stupid the idea is. They come up with a craftier plan: make a new plane out of the wreckage and fly out of there. Not stupid at all. Regardless, they crack on and work through the night and kip in the day. Slightly better plan.
I doubt that it's much of a spoiler to say that they manage to build an aircraft. My big problem with it though is that the passengers don't have lovely seats to sit on, they have to hold on to a metal pole welded on to the top of the wing. Surely Health and Safety would have something to say about that. Couldn't they have made some kind of harness or at least a little seatbelt. (NB Alton Towers: Air would be a lot safer if it had a little seatbelt too, like Nemesis. Sort it out.)
Flight of the Phoenix is all about the drama between the three main characters. Stewart is great, as always, in the role of the not-so-heroic Frank Towns. He is such a flawed hero that he's almost not a hero at all. Yet you're with him every step of the way. Dorfmann is a right little show off and, as Towns points out, is always right. Hardy Kruger is spot on in this role, making every line believable. Richard Attenborough is stuck in the middle of these two. When all three of them come together at a major plot revelation it must be one of my favourite scenes in any film. It's drawn out for so long but all three actors sell it completely. Some of the expressions on Stewart and Attenborough's faces are priceless.
It's quite a long film but worth watching for a Spanish Doctor who looks a bit like Shatner. If that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is. 7/10 evlkeith
If you like this you could also try: Flight of the Phoenix (2004), Ice Cold in Alex, Anatomy of a Murder.
