What an enjoyable movie this is, the type that offers two hours of escapist fun with no baggage or pretensions. It’s nothing special and provokes zero thoughts that one would deem as being profound, but then it’s about poker and Mel Gibson’s con man act. Nothing wrong with it at all and when it concludes you’re a wee bit sad there’s no sequel.
That’s a mission accomplished.
“When I was overseas during the war, Your Honor, I learned a French word. I’m afraid that might be slightly suggestive.”
For 1959, this is one coarse, salacious movie, peppered with manky chit-chat and innuendo in a subtle but all-out disruption of the Hays Code, James Stewart’s folksy lawyer our champion. It’s an entirely provocative movie.
James Stewart meeting Lee Remick for the first time, Duke Ellington’s jazz score accompanying the lawyer’s stride, is almost like a soft-core porno scene. I burst out laughing at how self-aware and, well, funny it is. Genre convention is acknowledged and upended in this flick through the art of taking the piss, but it’s also just cool – cool to look at, listen to. Even the poster is cool.
As courtroom dramas go, it grips for every minute. The instructive aspect of the picture ensures its continued significance as a spearhead in movies concerning the legal system, profession, and the court, the fallibility of the human element.
And Joseph Welch, who plays the avuncular but quietly authoritative judge, is the best judge I’ve ever seen in a movie and he wasn’t even an ‘actor’:
I can’t fathom the immense hoopla and ‘controversy’ surrounding this; my only conclusion is that folk in this age of hysteria have nothing else to do. Anyway, I have little regard for the original and view it as irrelevant – it’s certainly not irreverent – claptrap. I suppose it’s animated so that means it’s important ….
And this is the same, but just immeasurably more pointless. In a tale of baffling narrative choices, it swerves at one stage into barmy Peasants’ Revolt material, or a Robin Hood transposition with associated modern-day social democratic politics (I’m being serious) yet remains decidedly insipid and aimless.
Was this movie supposed to be about the titular dwarves or elementary economics and a mass rebellion against the oppressors? It was all a wee bit confusing, and I’m genuinely curious as to how so much time and money can be spunked on something so pedestrian. But I didn’t pay to see it so I’m not that bothered.
Seven midgets in a forest, a poisoned apple, silly songs, a talking mirror, a token uprising, and much ado about nothing.
Grow up.
It’s a one-in-a-million movie that shouldn’t exist. But it’s here … with us.
And it’s an utter riot, from Billy Zane with hair to Michael Biehn spouting Latin. It’s indeed a frenzy of quotes, with Val Kilmer’s lines more like witty sayings you gleefully take into life than the casual dialogue of his permanently plastered Doc Holliday.
A perfectly orchestrated yarn and the definitive O.K. Corral flick, it works as elegiac drama and pure entertainment. It’s the kind of Western Martin Scorsese would have made, such is the movie’s vibrancy and the finesse of the direction.
Kilmer is at his most weird and iconic here, his best ever performance. It’s so unlike anything else he did, and I can’t recall many other actors creating such an impression in a supporting role. You think of Doc Holliday, you see Val Kilmer in an instant. Alas, despite the mammoth career he had, it never quite matched his undoubted talent.
His wee swansong in Top Gun: Maverick (2022) was a lovely, heartfelt touch from Cruise, but it’s sad to see. It’s taken on a greater resonance now.
The dialogue is so unnatural in this subpar thriller it grates; some of it registers like it’s been lifted from another of the writer’s scripts and shoehorned in just because it sounded cool. There are many (too many) moments of characters shouting at one another in an attempt to up the drama, but the result is probably not what the filmmakers intended: exasperating.
It’s not much of a heist and this would have at least provided a dazzling centrepiece but the film is more interested in leaden dialogue exchanges disguising a by-the-numbers robbery.
Gene Hackman is the reason to watch it. Without the lad, this flick is indistinguishable from its brethren.
Desert island material.
This made a bus journey to Stirling cinematic.
Wee stroll around Haymarket, Edinburgh, and within two minutes I’m assaulted by an ad for Snow White (2025) emblazoned on the side of a manky bus to Wester Hailes, immediately followed by a vessel to East Craigs with a Cinderella panto gig (starring the redoubtable Grant Stott) draped beneath its windows.
Meanwhile, a lad was carrying a rug over his shoulder into your generic ‘Men with Ven’ and I had Aladdin’s magic carpet in my head.
My mind has been infected by corporations today.
It now functions as a low-rent Disney medley.
Bye for now.
The tackiest, most gimmicky slow-motion sequence opens this stagey, plodding bore of a time. It bombards you with the drab and dreary and seems to have no other purpose.
Connery is powerful as always, vulnerable and domineering both at once, but is wasted on a cruddy premise. And the camera ‘effects’ are so shoddy and unnecessary. It’s like a mediocre play but made even worse with superfluous shots which, rather than heighten the drama, merely draw attention to how dramatically damp everything is.
Heard so much about this movie over the years, the main leitmotif being that it’s a hidden gem. It isn’t.
It’s shite.
Stephen Graham features, hence this trumpeted Netflix miniseries had to be given a whirl.
The verdict:
Most of the acting is cringe. The desk sergeant is one of the “goonies” from Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and he has the thesp ability of Mickey Rourke doing an impression of Owen Wilson, but with a northern twang. This was an augury for the rest of proceedings.
The single take aims to go for a certain verisimilitude, I imagine, but it merely serves to elongate the stinky acting that could have been mollified through editing. But without the single take this would merely be another run-of-the-mill inner city crime drama. Which it is.
So there’s no point to any of this gimmicky tripe other than it being concerned social commentary. That would be commendable, but then the psychobabble commences in episode three and there are entire scenes here lifted right out of Primal Fear (1996).
It’s total pish and I don’t get the hype. Not that I care too much to delve into the reasons for it.
It’s certifiably COOL and immaculately framed, from a director who understands framing and why it matters.
Ryan O’Neal is once again in a masterwork in which he’s the only actor you can envisage as the protagonist. No one else did impassive cool like him, and it’s even a cool that suggests dimensions behind the glacial exterior. His career never progressed beyond that ’70s apex because director’s didn’t use him properly, oblivious to the magnetism and effortless insouciance he could radiate within a narrow range.
You don’t need a surfeit of unnecessary dialogue in a movie this visual, which is what movies are, first and foremost. And the verbal exchanges may be minimal, but memorable, nonetheless.
Why is this so stylish? It’s from 1978. Influential is the term.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 