Mel Brooks turned a gloriously-still-kicking 90 years old this week, and as a happy birthday I’m sure he’ll never read, a review of his debut feature length film. 

With Mel Brooks’ directorial debut The Producers (naturally, the writer-by-day writes as well), his most hostile, and therefore best, gesture is to perforate and embrace the Borscht Belt fascination with the essential and unerring failure of life itself. Its mantra being the incompatibility of the self with any semblance of success, the film’s bent is that even in attempting to fail, the only possible outcome for the universe to right itself is for you to inadvertently succeed. And, naturally, fail at your goal of failing. It’s high-concept-y, but more or less to The Producers’ benefit, Brooks plays it all low-brow, helping the film’s philosophical scripture feel more carnal and low-to-the-ground than presumptuous and high-minded. Continue reading →

A pair of reviews from a series last year I never got around to publishing…

The Dirty Dozen, a war film perched on the cusp of the New Hollywood and preluding the obstreperous cynicism of the 1970s, feels like a new breed of war film more akin to the nasty, capricious revisionist Westerns waiting in the wings of the late ’60s. The film, directed by low-flying Hollywood stalwart Robert Aldrich, insulates itself from the stodgy, antiquated chamber-bound quality of most anti-war films by inducing a feral fit that, in the final third, explodes into an outright anxiety attack. Although military cruelty is on the mind, The Dirty Dozen is hardly a courtroom drama; befitting its brusque title, it’s a grubby grotto of unmanaged anger that sands itself down sometimes not to detach itself but to express the dehumanized, dispassionate nature of war altogether. Casting Lee Marvin in the role of a military commander tasked with training a motley crew of reprobates and military prisoners to dismantle and destroy a Nazi high command party on the eve of the D-Day invasion, Robert Aldrich’s film casts a ghostly pallor over the so-called last moral war by threatening it with its own essential amorality. Continue reading →

A pair of reviews from a series last year I never got around to publishing…

Conventional wisdom places On Her Majesty’s Secret Service on a precipice of dueling expectations, both opinions belying the central duality of the film in question. On one hand, the supposed “first non-Connery” Bond picture is usually seen, not mendaciously I might add, as wanting for a little of Connery’s ice-cold charisma, like a film in search of a proper leading man. Not an inadequate statement on some fronts – the film’s copious one-liners really buckle without Connery’s silently menacing implications that they were naught but the last vestiges of brutal humor in a man devoid of humanity. As a counterbalance, we have the much-touted saving grace of the film: its thoroughgoing evolution of the Bond formula into the unsuspecting realm of character drama in the form of a new, brooding Bond and his burgeoning romantic relationship with Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg). Continue reading →

It does not take a historian to note how malnourished and jagged the late 1960s were in American society, or to point out the cataclysm that was the destruction of a nation whose identity had for centuries been predicated on turning the other cheek and smoothing over tension with a facade of nationalist fervor and small-town boot-strap pulling. Things erupted in the late ’60s, the nation fell apart, and film went with it, using that dislocation and terror to create a new breed of films that felt bruised and alienated and hurting from that social apprehension down to their very bones.
Continue reading →