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’:
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.
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.
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.
Was my fond memory of this movie clouded by nostalgia? Of course it was, but it’s not entirely rubbish.
We have embarrassingly cruddy dialogue exchanges and a bog-standard voice-over which is so nondescript it could be applied to a hundred movies. It runs out of ideas after 45 minutes, but looks and sounds glorious despite all the unchallenged British imperialism on display.
There is a ‘wasted opportunity’ dimension to it, given the highly respected screenwriter William Goldman penned the screenplay, and the Michael Douglas deuteragonist is as multi-dimensional as a Ned robbing Toilet Duck from a Lidl, in broad daylight, wearing a tracksuit from 1977. And Ice Man and Gekko’s methods of snaring this man-eating beastly duo aren’t imaginative and wearily become tiresome.
It’s nothing special; it’s not garbage, either, because it’s kind of funny.
But I don’t think Roger Ebert liked it much.
Even if Alex Ferns, a.k.a. wife-beating EastEnders villain Trevor Morgan, makes an appearance.
Eavesdropping on the Lothian Buses no. 29 bus brought me here.
Christoph Waltz features so I thought it worth a proverbial bash. It looks spectacular in an anonymous way. It’s cliche-ridden to the max. It gets boring very quickly.
I evacuated after 34 minutes.
Next.
The opening is ingenious, a peach of gleefully shameless gore and sadly the rest of the movie can’t top it. It’s a neat wee concept for a horror but it’s as predictable as you get. I made a wee bet (with myself) that one of the characters would allude to the Mary Celeste. Within half an hour they did exactly that.
These movies are funny – actor-stars like Gabriel Byrne turning up in dross for the lolly. Why not? I’d do the same if I were still offered decent scripts after my sins.
Some of the kills were amusing. It looks fine enough. It’s stupid, but I wasn’t bothered. A shitter to watch if you’re ever on a DFDS Seaways and you have fuck all else to do as the bar has closed.
This kind of nails the age – or how I imagine what this glitzy but grotty period was like.
I do enjoy a wee slice of ’70s kitsch, even if it features creepy, sleazy men in their element. That and the obligatory strangler. It’s quite depressing viewing when you’re reminded of the media of bygone ages, three networks and no other alternate content. All folk did back in the day, it appears, was supinely plonk themselves in front of a box every evening like veggies, not a modicum of purpose in the endeavour. I’ve been there; I was a cabbage.
Any fool who appears on a game show has to be hampered with serious deep-seated issues, and this includes Ronald Reagan on ‘What’s my Line?‘. And on the serial killer stuff, never trust a stranger possessing the hair of Meat Loaf.
Good movie.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 