Clint Eastwood stars as a former bounty hunter who helps a landowner (Robert Duvall) track down the Mexican revolutionary leader Luis Chama (John Saxon).
The landscape cinematography by Bruce Surtees is extraordinary. You could turn almost any frame into a poster. The soundtrack by Lalo Schifrin is perfectly judged, mixing western motifs with funkier elements.
Clint Eastwood is great, as ever. He’s essentially playing the same part he always plays, and you wouldn’t want it any other way.
It stars Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox as four friends who take a disastrous canoe trip in the northern Georgia wilderness before the river is dammed and an entire community is erased.
It works on multiple levels, like all great art. There’s a theme about poverty and the dispossessed – an entire band of society with no voice and no rights is abandoned and eradicated. Plus, there’s an ecological theme: we can never truly master the environment. There are also various moral questions that arise from their encounters with crazed locals.
There’s a wonderful and poignant soundtrack. The film is beautifully shot. The characters are extremely well drawn. The dialogue is believable. The acting is uniformly strong. The storytelling is lucid. It’s moving, gripping and profound.
Surprisingly, Francis Ford Coppola’s direction doesn’t seem especially notable. I far, far prefer the vision he brings to Apocalypse Now and Peggy Sue Got Married.
The drab, washed-out visuals are presumably deliberate, but these are another turn-off.
My loss, I know.
The SS Poseidon is sailing from New York to Athens when an underwater earthquake creates a huge wave that turns the ship over. A small group of passengers do their best to survive, despite the water coming in and the fires breaking out.
I was curious to see this film, which I had often heard about. It’s trashier than I expected. There’s a shabby made-for-TV quality to it, and it has none of the big-budget grandeur of disaster classics such as The Towering Inferno. The characters are absurdly diverse “types”, including:
• a rogue preacher (Gene Hackman)
• an angry, bad-tempered cop (Ernest Borgnine) and his ex-prostitute wife (Stella Stevens)
• a gee-whiz American kid (Eric Shea) and his older sister (Pamela Sue Martin)
• a woman given no other function than to be “a fat lady” (Shelley Winters) and her thinner husband Jack Albertson (Grandpa Joe in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)
• a nervous singer (Carol Lynley) whose band of beardy blokes doesn’t make it
• a kindly, injured waiter (Roddy McDowall)
• an absurd-looking runner (he jogs like a parody of a Carry On character), who’s too shy to have any luck with women (Red Buttons)
Meanwhile, Leslie Nielsen plays the captain. After seeing him in Airplane! and The Naked Gun, it’s strange to see him in a straight role: I kept waiting for the gags that never arrived.
The concept is good, but it’s poorly executed and poorly written. There’s a lack of dramatic tension. Too much of the film becomes a logistical challenge of getting a group of people past an obstacle or from one room to another. The ship is meant to be upside down most of the time, but it rarely looks that way. You only see it in close-up, and the lack of contextual shots mean that what you do see looks like a set. It made me respect the action sequences in James Cameron’s Titanic even more than I did already.
Character-wise, there are sections that are unintentionally comical – ridiculous, even. Often, one person is speaking and everyone else is holding a strange facial expression, such is the lack of dynamism in the group scenes. There’s a lot of unnecessary shouting, too. And you can tell when someone’s about to die because of the conversation they have beforehand.
Gene Hackman makes the most of the sub-standard material, but he can only do so much.
All these points aside, it’s entertaining enough.
